


The Augmented

by Island_of_Reil



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin | Attack on Titan
Genre: Alive Marco Bott, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Divided Loyalties, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Heavy Angst, Injections, Loneliness, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Military, Original Character Death(s), Regeneration, Resurrection, Spoilers up to Chapter 58, Titans
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-09
Updated: 2015-01-11
Packaged: 2018-03-06 20:38:44
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Underage
Chapters: 3
Words: 21,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3147839
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Island_of_Reil/pseuds/Island_of_Reil
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Thanks to the miracle of experimental medicine, Marco didn’t die at Trost. In the end, he’ll wish he had.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to [100demons](http://archiveofourown.org/users/100demons/pseuds/100demons) for beta'ing this for me.

“Breathe in,” the doctor says. His tag reads J. GOTTSPIELER, MD.; the left sleeve of his white coat bears the shield of roses. The MPs have their own doctors, an elite cadre that treats no one outside that branch of the military. The Garrison Legion shares its doctors with the Trainee Legion, and also with the Survey Corps. Nobody wants youths with promise as physicians wasted as titan fodder.

Marco obediently fills his lungs, trying not to flinch from the chill of the stethoscope bell against his bare chest. Dr. Gottspieler inclines his head, which is perfectly smooth except for a fringe of grey hair above his ears, in auditory concentration. “Out,” he says. Marco releases the air all at once.

“Good.” The doctor straightens up and tugs the earpieces out of his ears to let the stethoscope fall loosely around his neck. “You appear to be a healthy, strong young soldier, Cadet Bodt. I understand you’re in the top twenty of the current graduating class, with a decent shot at the top ten.”

“Yes, sir,” Marco says politely. He can’t help a small smile and a flush of pride in his cheeks.

“Have you decided yet which legion you’ll serve in?”

“The Military Police, sir. I want to serve the King with all my heart.”

The doctor’s gaze sharpens. He has round blue-grey eyes that seem not to miss much. “I may be able to help you do just that,” he says.

Marco’s eyebrows lift in surprise. “Sir?”

Dr. Gottspieler leans against the counter to the left of the exam table on which Marco’s sitting. His voice drops a little, darkens with warning. “Whatever your decision, none of what I’m about to tell you will be leaving this room.”

“Of course not, sir.” Marco presses his fist to the bare skin over his heart.

“Glad to hear it,” the doctor says wryly. “I’ll give you the abbreviated version. Medics are tasked not only with keeping soldiers healthy and helping them recover from injury, but also with seeking ways to make them better soldiers. To better enable them to fight titans. To better enable them to keep the peace. To better enable them to serve the King. You seem, Cadet, like a prime candidate to be… augmented, shall we say, in a manner made possible by medical research.”

Marco frowns. “Do you mean drugs, sir?” He has little experience with any sort of drugs, other than the odd bit of salve or syrup from the doctor in Jinae when he was little. The word conjures up for him terrifying images of the wretches who live in the interior’s Underground City, where he’s never been, only heard about. People who seek refuge from the squalor of their lives in numbing clouds of smoke and can never find their way out again.

“Well, yes, technically they _are_ drugs. But they’re not drugs that cure illness, or, one might say, provide diverting experiences. They are drugs that enhance a human being’s strength, endurance, and agility.” Gottspieler pauses. “These drugs are highly experimental. They may present medical risks to subjects, not all of which are completely known at this juncture.”

Marco’s heart jumps a little. The doctor seems to note his apprehension. “You do have the option of saying no, Cadet. It has been my experience and that of my colleagues that cooperative subjects have better outcomes. That said, the medical benefits have thus far been documented to be considerable — and, if you choose to receive this augmentation of your own free will, your cooperation will be highly rewarded.”

Marco blinks, then stares at the floor. He’s _likely_ to make it into the top ten of the 104th, but it’s not yet certain. He’s always dreamed of wearing the Unicorn, of living in the interior. His family’s house in Jinae is perfectly fine, but he could bring them along to Sina and settle them into something bigger, and they wouldn’t have to work so hard.

Jean’s definitely going to make it into the top ten. What if Marco doesn’t, but goes to the Garrison or the Survey Corps instead? What if Jean meets another MP and falls in love with him and forgets all about Marco?

With a deep breath, he raises his head and meets the doctor’s eyes. “I wish to participate, sir.”

“Are you sure?” Gottspieler asks, a hint of sternness in his voice.

“Very sure,” Marco replies with a firm nod.

The doctor remains still, eyeing him expressionlessly for a moment, then says, “Very well.” He turns, opens the door to an overhead cabinet, and takes down the sort of leather case traveling physicians often carry. His fingers make short work of the combination lock. The interior is lined with crimson velvet, and its indentations cradle a large syringe and an ampule.

Marco shivers a little. He’s only ever had an injection once, for plague, and it wasn’t pleasant. Then again, he’s now a lot older, and nearly three years of training have taught him to endure pain pretty well. He obediently lifts his left arm.

Gottspieler pierces the ampule with the hypodermic needle, drawing out a pale-yellow fluid until the barrel of the syringe is half full. Then he takes a vial of rubbing alcohol and a square of gauze from the countertop. He dabs a little alcohol on Marco’s forearm, making it tingle, then lines up the needle with the skin. Marco turns his head sharply and chews on the inside of his lip as the metal point bites into him. He thinks it’s not too bad, until the doctor says, “Done,” and withdraws the needle, and now it feels like a wasp sting.

“No, don’t rub at it,” Gottspieler scolds him, swabbing the spot again with more alcohol, which makes it burn. “I’m going to tape a bit of gauze over it. You can take it off in a few hours when the skin’s closed up.”

“Yes, sir,” Marco says, feeling somewhat chastened. A little sting is, after all, a pretty minor price to pay for what he’s been promised.

Gottspieler secures a small wad of gauze over the puncture with a strip of tape, then stands back and regards Marco coolly. “And that’s it — for now. You’re to come back in six weeks, just after graduation, to report any physical changes you’ve experienced. I’ll test your strength and reflexes, and I’ll make a note of any adverse reactions. If you experience any serious reactions or illness between then and now, especially in the next ten days, seek me out immediately. But I can reassure you such reactions are unlikely to happen.”

“Sir,” Marco says, buttoning up his shirt again. “Thank you, sir.”

“No, Cadet Bodt,” Gottspieler says. “Thank _you._ ”

****

A few evenings later he’s standing beside Annie Leonhardt in the kitchen as they peel potatoes. Other trainees are washing dishes, chopping vegetables, or handling other tasks. But it’s a large, cavernous room and they’re alone in this corner, surrounded by piles of peel that they’ll sweep up later. Bits of the stuff have stuck to the oversized off-white aprons that cover their uniforms; more of it rests on the insteps of their boots.

Annie’s knife works steadily and efficiently over each tuber, paring away rust-brown, exposing creamy off-white. She’s half looking at her work, half staring off into some stretch of distance that exists only in her mind. Marco doesn’t take her silence personally, though he does wish he’d been paired with a more sociable work partner.

Suddenly it occurs to him, with new significance, that Annie’s going into the MPs too. That she was able to flip Reiner, who’s twice her size, ass over head, even though she’s been anything but diligent in her training.

“Hey, Annie.” He has to raise his voice a little to be heard over the clash of pots and the ambient chatter. The pale, emotionless eyes flick rightward, their brows remaining at rest. 

Marco realizes at the last minute how the question might come off, a guy asking a girl about having had a doctor’s appointment. “Um… not to be nosy or anything, but have you had your final physical yet?”

“Yeah. Why?”

“Well… you’re going into the MPs too, so I was wondering…” He pauses, hesitant to break Gottspieler’s trust.

She doesn’t look puzzled or consternated or annoyed, just slightly impatient. “Wondering what?”

Marco sighs. Annie doesn’t talk much to anyone. This probably won’t go any further than the two of them. “Did they give you any kind of a shot?”

This time, her brows lift. “No.”

“Oh. All right.”

“Why?” she asks sharply.

“Um… forget it,” Marco says tensely, turning his attention back to the potatoes. He can feel her cold eyes on him for another full minute, but he doesn’t return her gaze. Eventually the sound of her blade slicing through potato skin resumes.

He doesn’t quite relax, but he manages to get back into the rhythm of peeling, able to pretend that he’d never said anything. After about ten minutes he darts a covert look at her. She seems as inattentive to him as she was before he’d first spoken — but then she turns her own head to catch him looking. He flushes and turns back to his own work.

“They gave you a vaccination, then?”

He looks up again in surprise. There’s nothing of note in Annie’s eyes, any more than usual, but something about her tone makes him think she’s prompting him to say _yes_.

“I… guess so,” he says. He flushes and looks down again. He’s a shitty liar, always has been. “Yeah, a vaccination,” he mumbles.

Annie is silent for a few moments. Then, not looking up from her work this time, she says, “I’m six months older than you are, if I’m recalling correctly. I had my physical six months ago, and that’s when I got vaccinated for plague.”

“Oh.” He can’t think of anything else to say.

They don’t speak again for the rest of the evening.

****

“Mmph!”

The air in Jean’s lungs leaves them in one huge rush as Marco throws him up against the inner wall of the storage shed, which shakes and rattles on its foundation. Damn, he looks so hot with the muscles in his arms and upper back tensed as he braces his palms against the wall. The long, hard stretch of his bare back ends in the firm, round cheeks of his ass, which Marco palms and squeezes greedily.

“You been getting extra rations or something?” Jean pants.

“No, why?” Marco growls, insinuating slickened fingers into the cleft.

“…not used to you… throwing me around like that,” Jean gasps, jolting as one fingertip finds his hole.

He doesn’t sound like he’s objecting to it. Jean’s always liked it a little rough, rougher than Marco was initially willing to give him. He doesn’t think he’s been any rougher with Jean this afternoon than he usually is these days. “Someone stealing _your_ rations?” he ripostes, enjoying the feel of Jean’s inner heat, Jean’s walls contracting around his finger. He adds a second one and watches Jean’s back muscles ripple. “You aren’t putting up a fight at all.”

“Why would I?” Jean groans, pushing back against Marco’s hand as Marco works him open. “Shit, just fuck me already, wouldja?”

Usually Marco likes to draw the moment out, finger Jean until he’s begging and his cock is dripping. But right now he’s violently hard and not in the mood for languid, leisurely love. “Okay.” He unbuckles his straps and belt, then undoes his fly. “I think I need more oil.”

Jean gives a husky laugh. “I don’t think we’re gonna run out.” Three nearly-full 200-liter drums of the oil used to lubricate 3DMG and related equipment stand against the door, and a few more are stacked to block the small shed window. The first thing Marco did when they got into the shed was to move them all into place, refusing Jean’s help.

“I don’t want to tap any of the drums.” Marco pulls the little vial out of his breast pocket and pours more oil into his right hand. “Oil goes missing, they’ll put two and two together and make it harder for people to use these sheds without authorization.”

Jean wiggles his ass with purpose at Marco. “Fine. Tap this instead.”

Marco smiles, throbbing a little. He coats his hard-on with oil, then works some more of it into Jean’s ass. Jean is squirming now, wrist shoved into his mouth to muffle the noises he’s making. “Put your arm down,” Marco orders, grabbing Jean by the hips, then raising his left arm to tug Jean’s head back by the hair. “I want to hear you. Loud.” 

Jean moans, not too loud but kind of desperate, and Marco thinks he could come from that sound alone. He holds Jean’s ass cheeks apart with his left hand while he guides his cock between them with the right, and once he’s lined up he plunges in. The front of Jean’s body thumps against the wall again, and Jean makes a strangled noise.

“Like that?” Marco grunts, not giving Jean a chance to adjust before he draws his pelvis back.

“Yeah,” Jean huffs, shifting his own hips backward. Marco slams into him again, and his chest strikes Jean’s back with a sharp, moist sound. He digs his left fingers into Jean’s shoulder, making Jean whimper, and holds him tightly by the right hip too as he withdraws again.

Jean is hot and tight and twitching around him, and he shivers and arches beneath Marco. Within five or six thrusts Marco can feel the perspiration on his own skin and see it shimmering on Jean’s. The slap of their skin picks up that filthy wet sound that he knows Jean loves.

“Like me fucking you like this?” Marco growls, angling his thrusts to hit the little gland in there. “Throwing you up against the wall like a little bitch?” Jean’s response is a louder, drawn-out moan. He likes being talked to dirty. Marco’s always found that kind of embarrassing, though he’s tried his best because it gets such a hot reaction from Jean. Today the filthy words seem to come a lot easier for him. “Won’t be able to walk straight when I’m done with you,” he grunts, deep in the rhythm now, savoring the feel of Jean’s round ass bumping repeatedly against his groin. “I’ll have to carry you back to the barracks with that fucked-out expression on your face. Everyone’ll know what I did to you.”

Jean almost screams, then instinctively jams his wrist into his mouth again. Marco doesn’t break his rhythm for a fraction of a beat as he grabs Jean’s hand and pulls his wrist free. “I _said,_ I want to hear you, like the dirty little bitch you are.”

That’s the last time Jean tries to cover his mouth. He issues a continuous stream of moans, cries, profanity, Marco’s name, and noises that don’t have names. He shoves his ass backward against Marco almost as hard as Marco is fucking him, trying to get as much of Marco’s cock as he can.

Suddenly Marco’s getting close. He throws his arms around Jean’s chest to pull him tight against himself. His right hand slips down to Jean’s cock and begins to jack it mercilessly while he hammers into Jean with short, brutal strokes. They’re both down to the ugly yells, the incoherent and undignified squawks and shrieks that you have to be in the moment to find hot. Then Jean gives one last long moan and shoots his load over Marco’s hand. Marco shouts again and starts to come into Jean, his thrusts starting to sound not just wet but squishy. After a few more he pushes Jean more gently up against the wall and leans against him, panting.

“F- _fuck,_ ” Jean gulps.

“Yeah,” Marco gasps, kissing the back of his neck.

Jean’s body twitches. Marco wonders if it’s hypersensitivity, but then Jean says with a hint of distaste, “You bring the towel?”

Marco pulls out of Jean with another juicy sound and stoops to rummage in his rucksack. From this position he can see come and oil running down the inside of Jean’s thighs. Rather than pass the towel into Jean’s open hand he wraps one arm around Jean’s left knee and sets to mopping him up himself.

“Dude, I can do that,” Jean protests.

“S’okay,” Marco says cheerfully. Once he’s gotten everything, he stands up and takes care of himself.

“There’s drops on the floor, too,” Jean points out. Marco stoops again, mops them up as best he can, then balls the towel up again and shoves it back into the rucksack. He stands up again and embraces Jean from behind, nuzzling his face into the crook of his neck.

“Man.” Jean chuckles. “What got into you?”

“Hmm?” Marco’s voice is muffled.

“You’re like a god today, Marco. Dragging all those drums into place without me helping you. Then throwing me against the wall like a ragdoll and fucking the shit out of me. I dunno what you’ve been eating but maybe you oughta eat more of it.”

Marco doesn’t say anything for a moment, although he squeezes Jean a little to express how flattered he is. He wonders if he should report this to Dr. Gottspieler next week, during their appointment. _Yeah, whatever you gave me is making me into a total sex machine, doc!_ He chuckles softly. Maybe the doctor doesn’t need to know about that. He’ll make up something about being able to move the drums easily without mentioning Jean at all.

****

As it turns out, he never has to make something up.

Marco’s running down a residential street in Trost, the gigantic feet of a nine-meter class thudding against the cobblestones behind him. His heart is thudding even louder, but his fear is meaningless, something to be scorned.

He lured that other titan away from Jean, and he’d do it again, a hundred times over. He loves Jean, Jean loves him, they’re going to spend their lives together in the interior once this nightmare is over and so is graduation. If the Trainee Corps is even going to _hold_ a ceremony this year, what with so many soldiers dead and injured. He tries not to think of Thomas, nor of Franz nor Mina nor Mylius, nor of all the other kids with crossed blades on their backs he’s seen torn to pieces today.

But… Eren. Eren just might save humanity. And, for that, Marco would lure titans away from him a thousand times over.

He thanks whatever gods there may be that he said yes to that injection, six very long weeks ago. If he’s alive by the end of the day, he’ll be the No. 7 graduate of the 104th Trainees Squad. But what’s more important — just as Eren is, ultimately, more important than Marco, more important than even Jean is to Marco — is that the amazing reserves of strength, energy, and speed the shot has given him have helped him fight the titans today, helped him save the lives of others soldiers. Including Jean’s.

But those reserves only go so far when you’re cornered in an alley, no other humans around to come to your aid, and you don’t have enough clearance to shoot out a grapple.

Marco screams as he’s grabbed and lifted up. The breath blasting out of the titan’s mouth is hot and foul, reeking of corpses and dental decay. Teeth the size of millstones come down on him, and he can’t tear his eyes away from them.

They tear his right eye away from him. And most of the right side of his body along with it, from the top of his head down to his waist.

The pain — there’s no word for the pain. It’s crushing and grinding and lacerating all at once, rending him from the outside in and then the inside out, shredding his ability to think, reducing his entire mind to one agonized nerve. Marco screams with the pain, screams through the remaining left half of his mouth with whatever vocal cords he still has in his butchered neck, screams through the bloody mess bristling with severed bones and cracked teeth on the right side of his face, hears his own voice thick and gurgling with blood and pulped flesh.

Then suddenly he’s falling, what’s left of his head splintering the wooden paneling of a wall, his ass and legs slamming into the cobblestones. The entire world sizzles a blinding white, and he doesn’t feel anything, or see or hear anything, for a long, long while.

Now and again he almost surfaces, consciousness winking out like a blown candle as soon as the pain slams back into his body and roars along his nerves. At one point he seems to perceive a tugging on the belts at his waist. He flashes back to Jean in the other street, pulling frantically at the dead soldier’s belt. Salvage. Scavenging. As the weight of his canisters, scabbards, and blades lifts from his body, he thinks he hears a familiar voice murmur, _Sorry. I’m so sorry._ And then he slips into the depths again.

The next thing he hears, or thinks he hears, is Jean speaking his name. Not calling it. Speaking it to another person. Jean’s voice is thick and choked with grief. There’s a woman’s voice, too, businesslike, but not unsympathetic. Their voices drift away. So does Marco — until he’s lifted off the ground. The agony jolts through him again and he starts to cry out, but it comes out a wheeze, through stiff, rusty vocal cords gummed with gore and a half-mouth crusted with blood.

“Shhh,” a voice says, a woman’s voice, on the deep side and self-assured. “I’ve got you, Marco. We’ve got you. You’ll be fine.”

It’s been a long time since Marco’s thought about his grandmother. She was a big strapping countrywoman who could pick him up in her arms and carry him around without strain, long after he’d grown too big for that with most grown-ups. He thinks of her now. Then the pain crests over his head, and the street blinks out of existence.

****

“Cadet. Cadet Bodt. Marco.”

He thinks he recognizes the voice. He rolls his head to the right. His head is supported by a pillow, and the pillowcase is a nice weave of linen, cool and smooth against his cheek.

 _… my …_ right _cheek?_

Marco opens his eyes.

_… my … eyes? Both of them?_

Dr. Gottspieler stands at the right side of the bed Marco’s in. His round bluish eyes are full of concern. “How are you feeling, son?” he asks solemnly. Marco doesn’t remember the man having called him _son_ back in his office.

“I…” 

Marco brings his hand — his right hand, the one that’s supposed to be _gone,_ what the fuck — up to his throat and feels around that whole side of his neck. There is thick, knotty tissue on the right side, but no raw meat, no splinters of bone. The hand itself feels a little shaky and weak, and so does the rest of that arm.

“The scars will fade within a few weeks,” the doctor says. “You won’t be able to tell you were ever injured there at all. The same with the scars on your face, and your hand, and the rest of that side of your body. But for the most part, your skin’s regenerated nicely, and so has everything under it. You’ll need a little physical therapy to help get the new arm functioning properly, but then again all your undamaged muscles have been atrophying for nearly a week now, too.”

Marco doesn’t say anything, because he has no idea where to even start asking questions. He pushes himself up on his elbows, or tries to. The doctor sits on the edge of the bed and helps him sit up with one arm around his bare shoulders; the bedsheet slips down to Marco’s hips.

A look around tells him that he’s in a small bedroom. It’s on an upper floor, judging by the view of the sky out the one casement window. It’s not quite as sparse as most military quarters; the walls are whitewashed, the floor beams polished. The long blue curtains match the rug on the floor, and a quilt of the same shade is folded on the chest at the foot of the bed. The furniture’s dark and sturdy, with nice brass fittings. A clock ticks on the wall to his left, and on the far wall, where the door is, hangs some kind of landscape painting.

“Is he awake?” comes a deep male voice through the closed door, sharp-toned and abrupt.

“Yes,” the doctor calls back, standing up again. “You may come in now, sir.”

The door opens and in walks one of the tallest men Marco’s ever seen, taller than even Bertholdt Hoover and just as lean, but with slightly broader shoulders under his long black overcoat. His sallow face is gaunt and heavily lined, with a fringe of black beard along his jaw. His small eyes are cold under his banded black bowler. He’s followed by a woman in an MP uniform who’s almost as tall as he is. She looks to be in her early thirties at most; her blonde hair is pulled back severely off her stern and sharp-boned face. Marco, suddenly aware that he’s naked under the bedsheet, flushes a bit and tugs it up so that he’s covered from mid-ribcage down.

The tall man’s face splits into a grin that displays dark-yellow teeth and doesn’t reach his eyes. “Aww. Look, Bianca, we got ourselves a shy one. Maybe even a _virgin.”_ The woman rolls her eyes; since she’s behind him, he misses it. To Marco he says, “Don’t worry, kid, she’s military too. She’s seen it all. And I don’t think she’ll wanna bang you in the condition you’re in right now anyway.”

Marco’s face grows even hotter. He’d mutter that he’s not into women to begin with, but all his instincts are screaming that he doesn’t want to give this man that much information about him.

“So. Is he gonna be worth a damn?” the tall man demands of Dr. Gottspieler. There’s no mockery in his voice now; the question is blunt and impatient. Marco stares at the doctor too. _Worth a damn for_ what?

“He’ll be perfectly suited to your needs, sir,” the doctor says, a thread of tension in his voice. “That said, he’s just woken up after almost a week unconscious, and it will take him a day or two just to be up on his feet and moving around normally again. You can’t throw him into training right away, and even when that time comes, he’ll need some therapeutic exercises on the new arm along with the routine training exercises. Don’t expect him to be ready for combat for at least a few weeks, Captain Ackerman.”

_Ackerman…?_

The tall man waves his hand dismissively. “Fine, fine. Care to make the formal introductions?”

“Cadet Marco Bodt, 104th Trainees Squad, seventh in your class,” Gottspieler says, “I’d like you to meet Captain Kenny Ackerman and Lieutenant Bianca Hauer of the Central Military Police Brigade, Interior Squad.”

Captain Ackerman doffs his hat and makes a mocking, sweeping bow in Marco’s direction. Lieutenant Hauer gives him a sharp nod.

“Sir, ma’am, pleased to meet you,” Marco says without any pleasure at all. “Look, I apologize if I’m being forward, but… may I please ask what’s going on? I was torn in half by a titan, and now I wake up here in one piece. I’m completely confused.” He decides he’s not going to ask the captain if he’s any relation to one Mikasa Ackerman.

“That injection I gave you, Cadet,” Gottspieler says. “You may have noticed that your strength, endurance, and reflexes have since all improved dramatically? Well beyond what most people would consider… human ability?”

All the hairs on Marco’s body rise at once, including those on his regenerated arm and shoulder. The inside of his regrown throat is suddenly tight with fear and sour with acid. He nods.

“That injection,” the doctor continues, “helped you survive what would have been a fatal injury to any other human being.”

Marco’s mouth works for a moment, then hangs open. His breath coming a little short, he says, “So, um… am I immortal now?”

Captain Ackerman starts to laugh uproariously, like it’s the funniest question he’s ever heard. The corners of Lieutenant Hauer’s mouth twitch upward. Gottspieler’s mouth is a hard, flat line.

Finally the older MP’s mirth begins to subside, and he chuckles, “Not _exactly,_ kid. Better’n’ most, though. That titan took out a chunk of your brain, but it didn’t touch your spinal cord. That goes, you go. You could burn to death too. But, yep, as the average human or even the average soldier goes, you’re damn near indestructible now.”

Marco frowns. “I… has anyone contacted my family to let them know I’m still alive?”

“No,” Captain Ackerman snaps, almost snarls. “Nobody in your former life is to know you survived.”

“My… my ‘former life’?” Marco repeats stupidly, fighting down a sudden surge of panic.

“Yes,” the captain repeats. “Your former life. You are now on an estate in south central Sina. And that’s where you’ll stay until you’re needed in battle. You’ll be training with a subsquad of soldiers from the Interior Squad who’ve all been augmented the same as you. Provided you survive whatever battles you’re in, you’ll come right back here again afterward and stay here. Dr. Gottspieler’s little project is top secret to begin with, but we can’t risk anyone knowing that it could make someone near-immortal.”

“I— no,” Marco says, his head lifting and his nostrils flaring, and the first surge of anger rising through his chest. “ _No._ I survived all that hell, and I never get to see my family again? Or my— my best friend? _Fuck,_ no.”

Captain Ackerman moves so quickly that the words are hardly out of Marco’s mouth before his head’s being yanked up by a fist in his hair and the edge of a blade is pressing up against his exposed throat. Even if he weren’t so debilitated, he’s not so stupid that he’d try to struggle. Dr. Gottspieler and Lieutenant Hauer stand rooted in their spots, his brows rising high up the smooth expanse of his forehead, her face impassive.

“Listen, you ungrateful little shit,” the captain hisses at Marco, whose heart is about to explode out of his chest. “I’m the one in charge of the Medical Augmentation Program for the Interior Squad. The doc here might have been the one to figure out all the nuts and bolts, but without my ideas, authorization, and oversight, it’d never have existed. I gave you a new life, and I’ll take it back without hesitation. I won’t just cut your throat, I’ll saw right the fuck through your spinal column. I _own_ you, Marco Bodt. Remember that.”

He releases Marco by flinging him backward. The back of Marco’s head strikes the headboard, and he grunts in pain. Weakly and slowly he sits up again, his chest heaving and his mouth dry, staring like a deer caught in torchlight at the two MPs.

“Captain Ackerman,” Gottspieler says, his voice heavily strained under the veneer of deference. “I think he’s gotten your message. May I please ask that he be left to rest for a bit? This is a lot for anyone to take in, and the poor boy’s been awake for less than an hour. I can fill him in on any other details until he’s ready to start the training.”

The captain fixes the doctor with a baleful glare for a long, long minute. Finally he turns those icy eyes on Marco again and says, “I want him ready for training by the end of the week.”

“I don’t see a problem with that, sir.” The doctor’s voice is neutral again.

“Come on, Bianca.” The captain stalks out without a look backward.

Lieutenant Hauer turns her head to track his movement. Then she turns forward again and says civilly, “Doctor, Cadet.” Her voice is deep and self-assured, and Marco’s stomach flutters with recognition as she follows her commanding officer out of the room and closes the door smartly behind her.


	2. Chapter 2

Marco raises his left arm out in front of him; it trembles a little under the weight of the anti-personnel firearm strapped to it. It’s not his dominant arm, and the muscles in it aren’t quite back yet to where they were before Trost. Neither are those in his legs, as this week’s marching and lap running have made clear to him. But at least he hasn’t had to rebuild all those muscles up from nothing, as he’s had to do for the ones in his right arm.

He takes aim at the human-shaped target three hundred meters away and fires. The gigantic bullet takes out a small chunk of its left forearm, maybe twelve centimeters from where the heart would be.

“Not bad, Marco,” Squad Leader Josephine Landsmann says from behind his left shoulder. “Big improvement just from earlier this morning. Let alone earlier this week. Maybe we can even get you back into the 3DMG by the end of next week.”

Marco’s heart leaps as he ejects the spent cartridge and loads a fresh one from his belt. He’s missed the sensation of soaring, the ability to control his body in mid-air that was honed over three years of intense practice. But Dr. Gottspieler, who has been staying on the estate to monitor Marco’s rehabilitation, has been vehement that he not attempt the 3DMG again until he’s regained most of his conditioning.

He turns to Josephine with a shy smile and catches her encouraging one in return. She’s in her mid-twenties and about as tall as he is, with sharp features, clever grey eyes, and a black ponytail.

“Yeah, maybe this freckly dumbfuck isn’t worthless after all,” Godmar Dachs says from behind them, with a loud laugh that Dolphus Amboss joins in on. Marco reddens a little but doesn’t respond. Josephine turns and gives the two men a few seconds’ worth of stink-eye but says nothing either.

An open hand thumps him on the back. “Good job, Marco,” Tilo Vogt says with unforced sincerity. Marco reddens a little more. He tells himself it’s just that he’s modest. It has nothing to do with Josephine’s second-in-command having fair coloring and a height and build like Marco’s and a sort of ruffly haircut and even a bit of length in his face. Because Tilo’s not much like Jean in a lot of other ways.

“Take fifteen, men,” Josephine says. “I could use a break myself.”

They unstrap the guns from their arms and set them on the sturdy tripods in the firing yard, then take off their cartridge belts and lay them carefully on the ground. Each of them stretches slowly and thoroughly, filling the air with the pops and cracks of joints being flexed. Marco curls and uncurls his right fist as he pumps the biceps of that arm over and over. He’s still astounded that he _has_ a right arm again, two weeks after the Battle of Trost. All the scarring there and elsewhere is gone, just as Dr. Gottspieler promised. And if it’s not as strong yet as his left arm, it’s getting there.

The five of them stroll to the side of the large equipment shed, so that they’re out of the afternoon sun. “Hot day,” Dolphus observes, stating the obvious. His handsome face is sweat-sheened and bright red under the smooth blond wave of his hair, as are his beefy forearms and biceps up to where his shirtsleeves are rolled.

“Thirsty day,” Godmar replies automatically. He’s the shortest of them and a bit on the scrawny side, with skin that tans easily, a mop of dark-brown hair, and thick features set in a semi-permanent scowl. He cranes his neck around and, seeing nobody else on the premises, slips his hand into his jacket. It emerges clutching a small, flat steel flask.

“Drinking during training hours is strictly prohibited. I could make you run laps for that, Brigadier,” Josephine says, but her tone is dry and her expression deadpan.

Godmar gives her a long, level look out of the corner of one narrowed brown eye. He takes a long swig, wipes his mouth and the bottleneck on his sleeve, and then passes it to her. She grins and takes a neater, shorter pull. 

When the flask reaches Marco, he takes a cautious sip, then makes a face. “Lightweight,” Dolphus says, half-teasingly and half-disgustedly. “Gimme that again if you don’t want any.” Marco passes it back with alacrity and Dolphus takes his second hearty swig.

On his very first day of training, Marco was rather startled that an elite squad would drink during their short breaks from handling extremely high-powered weaponry. “The augmentation boosts your tolerance,” Tilo said with a shrug. “And it’s not like we don’t boost it some more with elbow-lifting exercises on our days off,” Dolphus added, earning snickers and smirks from the others.

“So,” Godmar says now. “Any more word about the Survey Corps and their new pet monster?”

Josephine shakes her head. “Nothing new since last week.”

Dolphus belches loudly and wipes his mouth. “Shit. I was hoping the Jaeger kid might’ve stepped on Levi already. _Squish.”_ Godmar sniggers; Tilo smirks, Josephine tries without much luck to repress a grin.

“Wait,” Marco says. “‘The Jaeger kid’? _Eren_ Jaeger?”

Four pairs of eyes drill into him. “You know him?” Tilo asks.

“Y-yeah. Eren’s …” Marco swallows. “Eren’s a good guy. I know he's a titan, but he’s on humanity’s side.”

Godmar snorts. “Yeah, well, I dunno how much of this you know already, but the first time that ‘good guy’ came out of the titan’s neck he was threatening to, and I quote, ‘Kill you all.’ The Garrison was gonna turn him into a smear on Wall Rose before that drunken whackjob in charge of it decided to have Jaeger block the hole in the wall with a giant boulder.”

“But … he _did_ block the hole.” Marco knows that much, from the cheering that erupted far behind him as he sprinted down the residential street with the nine-meter class behind him.

“Yeah. After leaving a hell of a scar on this one girl’s face, though,” Dolphus says. “His sister or girlfriend, can’t remember which.”

“The valedictorian,” Tilo throws in as he takes the flask from Dolphus and has another pull.

“Right,” Godmar says. “Anyway, the whole operation was sloppy as shit. Then, after the titan blocks the hole, they cut Jaeger out of the nape and he’s all feverish. A bunch of ordinary titans are about to finish off him and his friends, but in comes the Survey Corps right in the nick of time. Jaeger’s in a coma for three days. Then he wakes up in the courthouse dungeon, and then they hold his trial.”

“The dungeon? His _trial?”_ Marco nearly squawks. “But he didn’t do anything wrong! He _saved_ everybody by blocking that hole. What the hell?”

Godmar glares at him. “You don’t see a problem with letting some random human, or rather some random individual who _appears_ to be human but can turn into a fifteen-meter monster at any time, run around free? Especially if he’s got military training? And double-especially if he’s threatened to kill the people around him?”

“Anyway,” Dolphus says before Marco can stammer another rebuttal. “Commander Dawk wanted him executed and dissected. Those crazy fucks in the Survey Corps said ‘No, give him to us, we can use him, we’ll keep him under control.’ And then Levi goes and fucking _demonstrates_ it in front of the whole courtroom.”

The name, spoken a second time now, rings a bell. “Levi…? Captain Levi?” Marco asks.

The other four make scornful sounds. “‘Captain’ Levi. Fucking jumped-up piece of shit out of the Underground gutter is what he is,” Dolphus says. Godmar turns and spits over his left shoulder.

“You ought to see his record, Marco,” Josephine says, her face hardening. “Erwin Smith wanted it expunged when he took that little asshole on. Officially, it _has_ been. But you better believe none of the documentation has actually been destroyed.”

“But… he’s Humanity’s Strongest,” Marco protests. He doesn’t know much else about the man, except that Eren looked up to him the way he looked up to nobody else. “He’s killed a lot of titans. Doesn’t that make up for anything he could’ve done?”

Tilo gives him a cool look. “So, Marco. How many dead titans does it take to atone for the murder of one human being, do you think? How about ten or twenty murders? How about ten or twenty murders, twice as many acts of torture, and too many other acts of violence to go into? When he kills a titan, how much money do all the widows and orphans he’s created over the years get out of it? How about crippled men and _their_ wives and children?”

Marco feels his face drain of blood; he’s too shocked by what Tilo’s said to feel the sting of being chastised by him. He doesn’t reply, just looks down at the tops of his boots. After an awkward moment he looks up again and said, “So what did he do to Eren?”

“Well,” Godmar says. “The kid’s kneeling on the floor with his hands chained around a pole behind him. He starts to make a speech, the tone of which is that he’s the only one in the courtroom who knows shit and everybody else is a fucking fool standing around with their thumbs up their asses.”

Marco starts to grin. That sounds like the Eren he knows — knew. But the grin freezes and falters when Godmar adds, “A bunch of MPs take aim at him. And that’s when _Captain_ Levi leaps over the rail to kick his fucking face in. Sends one of his teeth flying, even. After about a minute the kid’s face is a bloody mess.”

“He’s just kneeling there, taking it like a man, didn’t yell or beg even once,” Dolphus interjects. “That was impressive, I’ll give him that.”

Godmar picks up from Dolphus without missing a beat: “The big brass ask Levi if he doesn’t think this show he’s putting on might be _just_ a bit much. And the little fuck says, ‘Why? Weren’t you going to dissect him anyway?’” He takes the flask out of Tilo’s hand and finishes it off.

“‘Little’?” Marco echoes. It’s not an adjective he expected to hear applied to Humanity’s Strongest, but then again Josephine also said it of Levi.

“Yeah, ‘little,’” Dolphus grunts. “Hundred and sixty centimeters of violent psycho.”

“So,” Josephine finishes, “the Generalisimo declared Eren Jaeger the property of the Survey Corps. They’re training him like a regular recruit, but they’re chaining him up at night in their own dungeon, and Levi has complete authority to kick his ass again if he gets out of control. Or kill him, if he has to.”

Tilo’s mouth twists. “I gotta say, I’d rather be executed outright than handed over to that nasty little bastard for keeping.” Marco shivers.

Then Dolphus’s head lifts, and so do his pale brows. “Oh, shit,” he hisses. “Put the fucking flask away, Godmar.” Godmar is already stowing it and straightening out the lines of his jacket when Lieutenant Bianca Hauer rounds the corner. All five members of Squad Landsmann thump their fists over their hearts in unison and bark out, “Ma’am!”

“Squad Leader, Brigadiers,” Lieutenant Hauer says cordially, her face sternly blank. She’s in full uniform, including 3DMG, but her face appears dry of sweat, as do the roots of her pulled-back hair. She towers over all of them. “How’s the training going?”

“Quite well, ma’am,” Josephine says evenly. “All of us are at the very least on target, as it were, with our accuracy goals.” Though her expression is mostly neutral, the corners of her mouth have turned faintly upward.

Lieutenant Hauer’s cool blue eyes flick over to Marco. “You specifically, Brigadier Bodt. Have your strength and reflexes improved at all since you began to train again?”

“Y-yes, ma’am,” Marco says, gulping air.

“Marco’s been doing spectacularly well, Lieutenant,” Josephine says. “He’s still got a little ways to go, but he’s been putting a hundred and ten percent effort into both his therapy and his training exercises, and he’s got the results to show for it. An excellent addition to our team — and a real sweetheart, too. I’m very glad Dr. Gottspieler recruited him.” Marco blushes.

“Good to hear.” Lieutenant Hauer looks at Marco again, and suddenly she smiles: a little cool, a little stiff, but a genuine smile, not Captain Ackerman’s terrifying grin. “Keep it up, Brigadier. Do the Interior Squad proud.”

“Yes, ma’am,” Marco says again, unable not to smile back.

She inclines her head to the side and says, “And the rest of you as well. Have a good afternoon.”

“Ma’am,” they repeat, fists to hearts once more, as she strides off across the firing yard toward the estate’s administrative building.

“I think I just shit my pants a little,” Dolphus mutters once she’s out of earshot.

“Yeah, that’s one hard bitch,” Godmar says under his breath.

“Brigadier Dachs.” Josephine’s voice is sharp now. “You will not speak of your superior officers in such a fashion. Unless you would like to run laps for the rest of the afternoon, then miss dinner to scrub the floor of my office.”

Godmar’s head comes up, his eyes wide. Josephine holds his gaze until he drops it again and mutters, “Sorry, Squad Leader. I forgot myself there.”

“Apology accepted.”

There are a few seconds of awkward silence, and then Marco offers hesitantly, “I—I don’t think she’s all that bad. She’s the one who saved me. I was in a lot of pain, and she tried to comfort me before I passed out.”

“Me, too,” Tilo says quietly.

“Captain Ackerman, though... no disrespect meant,” Marco adds hastily, darting a look at Josephine. “But he scares me.”

They all chuckle a little, the tension dispelling. “Captain Ackerman scares everybody, except Lieutenant Hauer,” Tilo says. “You don’t want to get on his bad side.”

“True,” Josephine says. “But he’s the most phenomenal fighter I’ve ever seen. Even ‘Captain’ Levi couldn’t touch him. And a brilliant man.”

“Really?” Captain Ackerman didn’t seem stupid to Marco, but _brilliant_ wasn’t a word he would have ever applied on his own to the crude, cadaverous man who held a knife to his throat when Marco was barely strong enough to sit up in bed.

Godmar grimaces. “Yeah, actually he is. He came up with the basic concept of the anti-personnel weaponry, and he worked with the MP gunsmiths on the design. He could map out a battlefield in his sleep, too.”

“And he’s got vision,” Tilo adds. “Like… ideas about how things could be different, how we can make a better world for humanity.”

Marco stares at him, his mouth slightly open, but after the slapdown Josephine just gave Godmar he’s not sure he dares ask any questions.

Josephine lifts a hand to the back of her neck and rubs it a little. “Our fifteen minutes were up at least five minutes ago, men. Back into the yard.”

****

Outside of combat, military routine is military routine, no matter the legion. Get up at the crack of dawn. Muster in the yard. Split the morning between training and other tasks, with a fifteen-minute break in there somewhere. Half an hour for lunch. Spend the afternoon just like the morning. Shower, have dinner, relax, go to sleep. Rinse, lather, and repeat the next day, unless you have the day off. 

Squad Landsmann trains together six days and takes the seventh off. For Marco that day is, thanks to his circumstances, limited in its possibilities. He’s discouraged from training on the 3DMG or anti-personnel firearms while alone, for safety reasons, but he can run laps or do other exercises. He can clean his quarters. He can take very long walks around the enormous estate, admiring the old, ornate architecture of its buildings. He can hunt in the wooded areas or fish in the ponds. He has a key to its library, which contains more books than he’s ever seen in one place before — including quite a few that are blatantly heretical.

The library is the oldest building on the estate. Its ceilings arch with elaborate vaults that absorb even the glaring light of summer noon into its high shadows; its walls arch with windows of colored glass whose patterns depicts people and animals, kings and holy men, cropfields and battlefields, rivers and mountains. The first time Marco stood in the vast, echoing vestibule, staring through a dance troupe of dust motes at the long, high shelves crammed full of books, he thought, _Armin would kill someone to get into this library._ A pang of sadness chased the thought. Though it’s his family and Jean he thinks of the most, Armin is one of many other people he’s come to realize he misses.

Or he can socialize with any other Brigade members or estate workers around. The workers, for the most part, tend to treat Squad Landsmann with a wary courtesy, seldom engaging in more than a minute or two of pleasantries with them. Josephine, Dolphus, and Godmar have permission to leave the heavily guarded estate and go into Mitras or Stohess for the day. Marco, of course, does not — and neither does Tilo. Marco doesn’t ask Tilo why this is, because Tilo doesn’t ask that question of him, either.

Tilo’s a supportive squadmate and, when Josephine is absent, a decent leader. He’s also good company off-hours, Marco finds out. He grew up in northwestern Maria, an area even wilder than where Sasha Braus came from, so he’s an accomplished hunter. Jinae being none too urban, either, Marco hunts quite capably himself. They spend their first, then their second, days off together in the spacious woodlands at the estate’s northern edge, catching hares and wood grouse.

As Brigade members, they enjoy daily fare of such quality and quantity that wild game is no longer the same treat for Marco that it was in his trainee days. Still, they can sell the fur and feathers and any extra meat to estate workers who don’t hunt, or get a middleman to sell them off-estate. With whatever money’s left over, their squadmates buy them things from the cities, on request or as surprises. A book of poetry, say, or a book of pornographic drawings. A dagger with a gorgeously wrought hilt and scabbard, or a little horse or hound carved out of wood or bone, or a bottle of expensive liqueur.

“I should probably save more of it, instead of spending it all,” Marco says reflectively a few days after his first hunt with Tilo, when he and his squadmates are standing around on break.

“Why?” Tilo asks softly, his face blank.

Josephine, Godmar, and Dolphus all immediately discover something of immense interest on the ground at their feet. Marco’s throat tightens. He holds out his hand, and Tilo wordlessly passes the flask to him, his eyes unbearably soft. Marco lets the bitter brew scorch the ache out of his gullet.

But the extra money’s not the primary perk, barely even a secondary one. What Marco treasures most is the excitement of the chase, the mutual whoop of triumph when he and Tilo bring down their quarry. He takes a simple, easy pleasure in whittling a roasting spit and supports out of fallen branches with his military-issue knife. He finds a gritty relief in stripping off his shirt as he turns the spit in the oppressive heat of the flames. And, after they’ve eaten, he gives himself over to the blessed coolness of the nearby shaded pond, letting the water wash the sweat and grease from his naked skin.

On their third day off together, Marco breaks the surface of the pond with a vigorous, dog-like shake of his head and a burst of spontaneous laughter. All the bittersweet memories of sneaking off on hot and humid nights with half a dozen other trainees to a forest lake, to swim and smoke and drink and make out a little, don’t blunt the pure physical joy of plunging his overheated body into clear blue water, feeling the chill raise goosebumps even on his scalp, then thrashing to the surface with limbs that are growing ever stronger to suck air, wonderful cool pine-scented air, into his lungs.

He’s just shaken the droplets out of his eyes when he sees Tilo standing on a broad, flat rock about nine meters away. He must have just climbed out of the pond; water plasters his ruffled light-brown hair to his scalp. His head is tilted back as he extends the muscles of his neck. Rivulets trickle down over the rim of his collarbone, his hard pectorals, his sharply defined abdominals. A few slide sideways and down into the deeply cut vee of his groin.

Marco purposefully does not stare at Tilo’s cock. It’s flaccid and shrunken, anyway, as anyone’s would be after a plunge into chilly water. He does, however, watch a few more trickles catch and glisten in the pale, fine hair covering Tilo’s wiry thighs before he turns his head away.

“Hey. Marco.”

Sharply he turns back to face Tilo. He catches the sly, secretive smile on Tilo’s face. He catches his breath. The world hangs for a long, aching moment. Then the smile becomes a grin as Tilo roars and throws himself back into the pond, sending up a wall of water that crashes down hard over Marco’s head and face.

Marco coughs and sputters. He reaches out to grab Tilo and dunk him in revenge, but the wetly shining head is already too far away as Tilo breast-strokes toward the furthest shore of the pond.

****

At muster one morning early in Marco’s seventh week with the Brigade, Josephine says, “Men, Captain Ackerman and Lieutenant Hauer are convening a gathering of the entire Interior Squad here in three days. Each of the twelve subsquads, including our own, will participate in a ceremonial drill. In addition to making sure that your personal quarters are in tip-top order and your dress uniforms clean and pressed, you will put in additional practice with the anti-personnel firearms and the 3DMG over the next three days to ensure that our performance is absolutely flawless.”

The bottom falls out of Marco’s stomach, but he sets his face as if in stone and salutes along with Tilo, Godmar, and Dolphus. “Ma’am,” they say in unison.

The three days fly by. An entire year could fly by, Marco thinks, just on the terror generated by the knowledge that one must earn Captain Ackerman’s unmitigated approval by the end of it. The Military Police Brigade, even its most junior members, are not usually held to the same everyday standards of tidiness that trainees are. But Marco has always been neat in his habits, so unlike Dolphus and Godmar he doesn’t have to practically shovel out his room like an unkempt stable. He does scrub the floor hard, dust and polish the furniture, tip a laundry worker to put extra starch in his bedlinens, and bounce a piece of silver off the surface of his bed once he’s made it up.

His dress uniform he doesn’t have to worry much about, as he’s never worn it before. It’s secondhand, originally owned by a Brigadier of exactly his height and build and worn just once before that Brigadier was killed in the line of duty. (How, Marco is not told.) It was hanging clean and pressed at the back of the man’s closet when he died, and then it was put into a cedar chest for storage; all Marco has had to do is iron out the folds. His dress boots, on the other hand, are entirely his responsibility. He polishes them on the first night after learning of the imminent gathering, and he looks them over on the second and third nights for any specks of dirt he’s missed.

And he trains. He trains with his squad. On the last two days before the gathering, they train with the eleven other subsquads, who arrived the evening before and are staying in the estate’s guest inn. They train with two of those squads in particular. Marco doesn’t think he’s ever trained this hard in his life, even while he was trying to make sure he got into the top ten of the 104th.

His right arm is as strong as his left now, and his left is even stronger than it was before the titan tore him apart. His legs and torso have returned to prime condition as well. He glides through the air on his 3DMG as expertly as he did in the forests outside Southern Division Trainee Headquarters or when he came to Jean’s aid in that street in Trost. His new eye and his old eye work in perfect concert when he focuses on a target in the distance. Three hundred meters away. Six hundred meters away. Nine hundred meters away.

The night before the drill is a convivial one. In the inn’s large and airy common room, Josephine, Tilo, Godmar, and Dolphus shake hands with members of the Interior Squad they’ve never met before, clasp arms with the ones they have, even embrace a few of the latter. They introduce Marco to all of these people. He smiles; most of them smile back. But each of them is appraising him, and maybe as more than just a brother-in-arms whom they’ll have to trust to cover their backs. He hears the word _augmented_ whispered more than a couple of times in his wake and those of his squadmates.

The word isn’t always spoken with suspicion and unease. Before dinner Marco finds himself leaning against a wall facing a pretty young woman, one with Godmar’s coloring but delicate features, her hair caught up in a complex knot at the back of her head. He might not be into girls, but he can tell when one is all too obviously angling to get him into her bed for the night, so he’s not exactly surprised when she teasingly asks him whether it’s true what she’s heard about augmented men. Evidently the “top secret” Medical Augmentation Program is not that much of a secret within the Interior Squad.

“Well,” he says with genuine modesty, “my most recent boyfriend didn’t have any complaints.” His longing for Jean suddenly rises in his chest, hot and painful; he raises the bottle of ale in his hand to his mouth and sips from it sparingly.

“Ah,” the woman says, brows rising in comprehension. She remains chatting with him for a few more minutes, her tone still friendly but the suggestive slyness gone, before she excuses herself and slips across the room.

Though Marco’s always been comfortable enough in crowds, all the assessments, covert and not so covert, are beginning to eat at his already frayed nerves. He takes modest sips of ale to soothe them; when Josephine’s eyes catch his in warning, he meets them and nods in obedience. She told them in earlier no uncertain terms to watch their alcohol intake, augmented tolerance notwithstanding: “If any of you shame me tomorrow because you’re hung over, you won’t have to worry about Captain Ackerman. I’ll drag you all the fucking way to Wall Rose myself and pitch you over the top.”

Nobody’s getting drunk tonight anyway, despite the ale and vine circulating freely among the crowd and the occasional too-loud laugh. They fortify their stomachs with an unsurprisingly excellent dinner: roast venison, potatoes baked in a sauce made with a nutty-flavored cheese and black pepper, and the last mild greens of spring. The rolls are piping hot and fluffy, the butter for them churned only this morning. Wistfully Marco thinks of how Sasha would love them. The dessert platter is a mound of soft sweet cheese under a heaping pile of fresh berries; he licks his lips at the sight of it.

Marco makes some conversation but mostly listens to the Brigadiers at his left and right and across the table. They talk about their families, they talk about the anticipated harvest this year, they talk about the deer they shot or the fish they caught the other week, they talk vine and ale and which taverns in which cities have the best. Before long they’re talking about life in the Capitol District, and shortly thereafter they begin to talk about politics.

His head comes up a little when he hears the phrase _Survey Corps_ spoken by the Brigadier across the table from him. The man’s grey brows are furrowed, the corners of his mouth turned down under his long grey moustache. The others around them mirror his expression.

“All those poor young kids dead, and for what?” snarls the pretty young woman from earlier. She wound up seated at Marco’s left and has spent most of dinner flirting with the man to her own left.

“You’re talking about the 57th Expedition?” he asks her now, cautiously attentive. The squad’s hashed that one out over and over on break for the last few weeks. Every Brigadier under the age of about thirty was in training with at least one person who died on the expedition, and plenty of older Brigadiers were as well. In his trainee years, Dolphus was friends with five of the Scouts who were killed, their scores not having been high enough to get them into the MPs. While he’s never been what you might call sunny or sanguine, there’s a bitterness in him now that wasn’t there before.

The woman nods, her lips twisted, and picks up her vine glass. The rather ugly but bright and amiable young man to Marco’s right says, “Some seasoned soldiers, too. Their entire Special Operations Squad.”

“That was Levi’s squad, right?” another person says.

“It was,” the older Brigadier across from Marco grunts. “Unfortunately, _he_ survived. So did Smith, Zoë, and Zacharias. Smith and his closest friends always manage to come back from these fiascos alive, for some odd reason.”

Marco fights the urge to ask who else might have died on the expedition. Josephine refuses to give him any information she happens to learn about his old training mates, and she’s forbidden his other squadmates to do so as well. “You need to let go of them, Marco,” she said forcefully but not unkindly to him in private one afternoon, her eyes soft and her hand resting lightly on his forearm. “You’re gone. _They’re_ gone. All you’re doing is rubbing salt in your wounds.”

“What _was_ the whole point of that expedition, anyway?” the young woman asks. “Didn’t they have the Jaeger kid with them? You’d think he could’ve turned into a titan and protected them. That’s why Generalisimo Zacklay gave him over to the Survey Corps, wasn’t it?”

“I don’t know about that,” the ugly young man says, “but the purpose of the expedition was to get to the site of the kid’s old house in Shiganshina. There was supposedly something important in the basement they had to find.”

The older Brigadier snorts. “And if they’d made it there, the ruins of the house probably would have collapsed on those feckless fuckwits. It’s par for their course.”

The young woman says bitterly, “The Generalisimo should’ve just given that damned boy to us. He’d be doing a lot less harm as pieces in jars of formaldehyde than he is now.”

Marco loses interest in the food that remains on his plate. When the dessert platter comes around, he politely shakes his head no.

****

The drill is held on the parade grounds of the estate, much larger than even the firing yard, where the squads have been spending a great deal of time over the last few days. _Parade grounds_ is an inexact term for it, Marco thinks.

The eastern end is an open space set with five concentric semicircles of benches, each higher than the one in front of it. The benches are full of higher-ups from the Brigade — mostly middle-aged and older, mostly men — plus a smattering of younger assistants and lieutenants who have accompanied them to the estate. In front of the benches and facing away from them, the estate workers have set three sturdy and ornate chairs.

About five hundred meters away on the opposite side of the chairs, five towering rows of oak trees begin to march out to the western end of the grounds, spanning more than a thousand meters. The rows stand three hundred fifty meters apart, and each tree stands a hundred meters apart from the one before it and the one after it. Near the western end of this artificial grove, in each of the aisles between the trees and also just beyond the northernmost and southernmost of the oaks, stand towers of bull’s-eye targets five high.

In the space between the three chairs and the first of the oaks stand the Interior Squad in four rows of fifteen. An anti-personnel firearm is strapped to each wrist, a 3DMG canister sits on each hip, and ten anti-personnel cartridges hang at the small of each back. The sixty Brigadiers hold their right fists rock-steady over their hearts, despite the weight of the guns. Squad Landsmann are in the front row, between Squad Voorhees and Squad Jarosz.

Despite the coal smudged under their eyes, they all blink in the the morning sun, which silhouettes the three figures seated before them. Captain Ackerman has the center seat; he’s dressed as he usually is, though today his tie is fastened. To his right is Lieutenant Hauer in full dress uniform. To his left is a man in fine but not ostentatious formal civilian wear. His face is one that Marco would call nondescript, except that his large eyes look strangely, tantalizingly familiar.

“Men,” Captain Ackerman says, projecting his voice without trouble; it echoes past them and down through the rows of trees. “You know me, you know Lieutenant Bianca Hauer. Most of you, but not all of you, will know Lord Roderick Reiss, whose family has owned this land for a long, long time. You can thank Lord Reiss’s generous patronage, in large part, for your status as the most elite soldiers of the Military Police. The most elite soldiers of humanity!”

Someone at the far end of the front row lets out a whoop, and all sixty of them take it up, their right fists rising from their breasts to stab into the air. The hairs on Marco’s nape stand on end, and a hot, bright pride swells inside of him. He can forget, for a moment, that the man whose words have made all of them cheer threatened not very long ago to behead him with a knife.

“Therefore,” the captain thunders as the yells of triumph fade away, “you are going to show Lord Reiss just how elite you are. Ready, men?”

“Ready, _sir!”_ sixty voices shout in unison.

“Then _go!”_

Squads Voorhees, Landsmann, and Jarosz rise into the air as one, but with Squad Landsmann out in front. Josephine is first, followed by Godmar and Tilo, with Dolphus and Marco bringing up their rear. The other two front subsquads, similarly staggered, are close behind them, and just after them the second row is taking flight.

It’s another warm day, warmer still for those in uniform and 3DMG, but the stream of cool air passing through Marco’s hair and past his cheeks cools him deliciously as he shoots out a grapple. It sinks, perfectly centered and fully anchored, into the trunk of the first oak on the far right. He alights on a sturdy branch midway up, rocking gently on the balls of his feet before launching himself forward again.

He doesn’t land on the next oak but makes an elaborate arc of fluid yet precise turns around it. Without needing to think about it he stretches out his arms and legs, making a kite of himself, when he wants to slow down, and draws them in to increase his speed.

The third oak, he does land on — after turning a somersault in mid-air. His boots hit the branch simultaneously with his squadmates’ on the third trees in their respective rows. He’s nearly light-headed with glee: That maneuver is almost never executed with such perfect synchronicity. The thumps of Squad Voorhees’s boots behind their own aren’t quite as simultaneous. Marco can imagine Josephine trying not to smile too hard at that, lest she disrupt her concentration.

They soar, glide, and dance around tree after tree. They execute tricky turns around or through branches allowed to grow too profusely, or bent to grow at awkward angles, for the express purpose of confounding learners. They spin like tops and dive like hawks in the spaces between the trees. After so much rigorous training, Marco doesn’t have to think his movements at all, beyond initial recognition: his muscles remember everything. His mind is afloat on a tide of delight at his sheer physical competence, at the sun and the breeze on his face, at how seamlessly his subsquad moves as one, at how all the other subsquads will from now on speak the name _Landsmann_ with a hushed reverence.

At how, in less than two months, he has gone from a shredded corpse in a Trost gutter to a soldier more elite than any raw recruit in the top ten of his or her training class.

It takes very little time before Squad Landsmann alight in the very last oak trees of their rows. Each of the five Brigadiers points both arms, aiming at the topmost bull’s-eye on either side, and pulls both triggers. Each massive bullet either blows a hole right through its target’s bull’s-eye or flies cleanly through that made by its predecessor. The sole exception is Tilo’s and Josephine’s bullets colliding on impact with the target and taking out a huge, ragged chunk of the center together.

Seamlessly, as one, each member of Squad Landsmann ejects the spent cartridges, reloads both guns at once, and aims for the second target down. Nobody’s bullets collide this time. Nor, despite the increasing distance and the increasingly acute angle, do they do so on the third target, nor the fourth, nor the last one on the very bottom of the towers.

As one, the five of them execute an about-face and head back toward the parade grounds’ eastern end. For the first dozen or so trees, Marco’s boots must clear the heads of Brigadiers who were behind them in the starting formation. Leaves drift down around his own head as shots continue to reverberate throughout the grove. Then the oaks are all his again, and he and his squadmates repeat the intricate patterns of leaps, flips, twists, and arcs. The sun shines down more brightly on his face as they approach the easternmost oaks, leap over the highest of the branches, and begin the long, final float earthward.

Squad Landsmann alight in the center of the front row, just where they were standing earlier, without the slightest of stumbles. Squad Voorhees land to their left, Squad Jarosz to their right, and many more boots thump against the dirt as the nine other subsquads resume their places in the rows behind. Sixty fists thump against sixty hearts, and the cheer that goes up now is one of ecstatic victory.

The higher-ups and their subordinates rise from the benches, shouting and clapping. The younger ones are the most enthusiastic; some of the older ones are more quiet and reserved in their praise. The Interior Squad bow deeply to them and to the three who have remained in their chairs.

When the applause has died away, Captain Ackerman rises from his chair. Though his expression is as sour as ever, there is satisfaction in it, too. “Good job, men. What d’you think, my lord?”

Lord Reiss, staring blandly at the Interior Squad with those oddly familiar eyes, nods slowly. “I’m impressed, Captain. An excellent show. My trust in you is, as always, well placed.”

“My lord,” the captain says with a slight incline of his head, acknowledgment without much in the way of deference. He then addresses the entire Interior Squad: “You’re probably wondering what the occasion for this whole shebang was. Well, you’re right to wonder. Men, we’ll need you in battle in two days.”

Marco’s head lifts, as do most of the heads around him. He hears sharp intakes of breath, mostly through noses. His heart, which has just begun to slow again, resumes its hammering.

“The Survey Corps has gone rogue,” Captain Ackerman declares. “They are attempting to overthrow the monarchy — and they are responsible for the murder of Edward Reeves, the CEO of Reeves Enterprises. It’s up to us to take them down.”

The other fifty-nine soldiers emit not a peep of surprise or outrage. Marco gnaws his lower lip and digs his fingernails into his palms.

“Mr. Reeves,” Captain Ackerman continues, voice ringing out in all directions, “was second to none among civilians in his dedication to the military. He provisioned all three legions with food and other necessities for years. And what did he reap for this devotion, men?”

He pauses, then says darkly, “I’ll tell you what he reaped. He was found lying on a street in Trost with his throat cut, like a common criminal. His son Flegel, who was close to him, is missing, and at this point we’re presuming he’s dead as well. Commander Smith has been taken into custody by Commander Dawk. The Brigade is on the hunt for his subordinates, and the Corps has been officially disbanded under suspicion of treason.

“At sunup tomorrow,” Captain Ackerman continues, his voice ringing through the oaks beyond them, “we’ll ride south for Trost, where we’ll be smoking the Survey Corps out. As you know, it’s a long-ass trip, so we’ll be riding there hell for leather over the next two days. There are inns along the way that will supply us with fresh horses specially bred for speed over long distance; we’ll stop at one every four hours. We’ll also stop at inns on both nights, which’ll be faster than making and striking camp. You’ll be allotted about seven hours’ sleep per night. More than enough rest for the elite of the elite.”

He turns a gimlet eye directly upon Squad Landsmann. Though Josephine is at the very center of the row and the squad, his gaze lands hard on Marco. “Especially,” he adds, “for those of you with a little extra something in your bloodstreams.”

Marco’s heart sticks in his throat. Whispers fly and hiss around and behind them.

He thinks about what he’s just been told. He thinks that he’d happily stay a prisoner on this estate for the rest of his days if it meant he never had to go back to Trost. It is, or was, a nice city. Jean showed him around it on several of their off-days. It’s also where too many of his comrades, his friends, died. It’s where Marco himself died. The idea of seeing that one street again in particular makes his stomach buckle.

What’s worse is that he won’t be fighting titans there, but humans, and humans he knows — _knew_ — and liked. Eren’s with the Survey Corps, and therefore so must be Mikasa. From the conversations he overheard in Trost while they were waiting for the announcement from Commander Pixis, he knows that many other recruits of the 104th became convinced of the need to devote themselves, maybe sacrifice themselves, in the same manner. He wonders which of them he’ll encounter in battle: him at the ends of their blades, them at the barrels of his guns.

At least, he thinks, he doesn’t have to worry about having to fight Jean to the death.

“May I please ask a question, Captain?” calls out a voice far to Marco’s right.

“You may, Squad Leader Jarosz.”

“Sir, might we have to take down the titan boy who’s in Survey Corps custody?”

Marco’s heart stops, then begins to pound again.

Captain Ackerman shakes his head. “No. I can’t give you the details right now, but when it comes to putting down the Survey Corps, let’s just say that Eren Jaeger has already been taken out of the equation.”

Whatever breakfast is left in Marco’s stomach curdles and threatens to come up on him. He swallows the bile as it repeatedly rises in his mouth. 

“Any other questions?”

Over the next fifteen minutes, six or seven Brigadiers raise their hands to ask the captain about this tactic or that logistic. Marco doesn’t hear any of it. He vaguely sees the concern on Tilo’s face just to his right, but he doesn’t meet his squadmate’s eyes.

“No more questions?” Captain Ackerman barks, glaring at the assembled squads. When no one else raises a hand, he says, “All right, then. You’ve got the rest of the day to get yourselves ready. Pack only what you need. You’ll be provided with food and water along the way. Be at the front gates of the estate by sunup. We’ll have horses ready for all of you. Dismissed!”

 _“Yes, sir!”_ the Interior Squad bark in return, thumping their chests, before they break formation and drift apart into little groups to talk.

Marco doesn’t linger to chat after he’s unbuckled his guns and left them on a pair of tripods. He begins walking briskly toward the dormitory, just barely not running. Once he’s out of the crowd’s sight, he breaks into a run, and he tries to ignore both the sprinting footsteps behind him and the worried call of, “Marco! Wait!”


	3. Chapter 3

Marco’s rounding the southern wall of the dormitory, heading for the front door on the east side, when the nausea overtakes him. He staggers to the wall, braces his left palm against it, and vomits.

“Marco!” Tilo’s boots pound hard against the ground as he catches up to him. “What the hell, are you okay?”

Marco retches again and again, the remnants of the morning’s bacon and eggs splattering in the dirt at their feet before it’s only bile burning his throat. Tilo waits until he’s done, then grips his shoulder tightly. “Marco. Are you okay? What’s going on?”

“I… I think there must’ve been a bad egg this morning,” Marco gasps.

Tilo’s eyes narrow. “No one else has gotten sick from breakfast. And if it _was_ food poisoning, and it wasn’t coming out the other end too, why would you run all the way here instead of just go off to one side of the parade grounds?”

Marco pulls his handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and wipes his mouth. “I… didn’t want to worry everyone else. Didn’t want them to think maybe there’s a stomach bug going around and our squad had it. Nobody needs that kind of worry.” He’s rambling, he realizes.

Tilo leans against the building with his arms folded, regarding Marco with an unreadable expression. Finally he asks, almost conversationally, “Anyone ever tell you before what a shitty liar you are?”

Marco gives a half-laugh. “It’s that obvious?”

“Quite obvious. Both my little twin brothers were more convincing liars by the age of eight.” Tilo shakes his head ruefully. Then he lays his hand on Marco’s forearm. “Look. Why don’t we go somewhere to talk where we won’t risk running into anyone else?” Marco opens his mouth to object, and Tilo says sharply, “Marco. Remember that I outrank you. I just gave you an order, Brigadier.”

Marco closes his mouth and nods. He realizes he feels almost no embarrassment at having puked in front of Tilo or shame at having committed that minor act of disrespect toward him. The dread that’s icing his insides has left him too cold for either.

“Where do you want to go?” he asks.

After a few seconds’ reflective silence, Tilo says, “The library.”

****

The library is the quietest place on the estate, far quieter than even the woodlands, which are full of birdsong and breeze. Marco often takes refuge in it, as does Tilo. Josephine uses it now and again to research something, typically logistics. Godmar and Dolphus never darken its doors. Estate workers are forbidden entry, other than a few cleaners who have been trusted with its key because they cannot read. Marco’s heard that perhaps half a dozen visiting Brigadiers have dropped in to browse the heretical books over the last few days, but he can’t imagine that any will find the time today, now that they all have to prepare, pack, and rest before sunup.

Marco enters the ancient building first. Tilo comes in behind him. Though he pulls the door shut as gently as possible, it’s a massive slab of iron, albeit one with artful patterns wrought on either side. The sound of it returning to its frame echoes through the still of the space within.

He unbuckles all of his Gear and sets it all gently on the floor against the wall. Marco follows suit, metal clattering on tile with a faint echo. Then Tilo says, “Have a seat.” Marco moves to one of the reading tables, a long stretch of well-polished wood that might just be as old as the building, and pulls out a chair. He’s a bit taken aback when Tilo sits not across from him, but beside him, fairly close to him in fact.

“Talk to me, Marco.”

Marco opens his mouth, tries to find the words, can’t, closes his eyes and feels them prickle behind their lids. Goddamn it, is he actually going to cry in front of Tilo?

“Take your time,” Tilo says softly. “Find the words. Don’t worry about breaking down. No one will see or hear you but me, and… well, trust me, I’m not going to judge you for anything.”

Marco breathes deeply, Tilo’s words steadying him. He looks his senior squadmate in the eye and says, “I… I don’t know that I can do this, Tilo.”

“Because of your friends in the Survey Corps?” Tilo asks quietly. 

Marco just nods, propping his right elbow on the table and burying his face in his palm. Now the shame is starting to creep in. The Military Police Brigade didn’t augment, rescue, revive, and retrain him out of the goodness of their hearts. Having to convince Captain Ackerman of his worth is just a matter of survival. But his squadmates trust him, like him, vouch for him, share their drink with him. How could he let them down like this?

He’s surprised when he feels Tilo’s warm, rough right hand cover the back of his own left hand. When he looks up, Tilo’s amber eyes seem darker than usual, even with the late-morning sun bathing the floor of the library in a bright golden mist. A pang cuts through Marco’s gut, a pang utterly at odds with his misery and shame and dread. He mentally brushes it off as an artifact of his own loneliness.

“Marco,” Tilo says, speaking so softly now that he might as well be whispering. “You have to let them go. And not just because it’ll get you killed, get us killed, in battle. If you don’t, you’re going to destroy yourself, long before your body dies for good.”

_“What difference does it make?”_

The agonized sob echoes, harsh and ringing, throughout the library. Tears have welled up in Marco’s eyes and spilled onto his cheeks, and he repeats, bitterly and savagely through the thickness in his throat, “What difference does it make? I’m a dead man, Tilo. My friends think I’m dead. My family thinks I’m dead. The man I love thinks I’m dead. God, I wish I’d never said yes to that injection. I wish I’d died in that fucking gutter in Trost. I wish they’d burned what was left of me on a pyre.”

He tilts his head back, despite how it makes the snot collect in his throat. He can’t look Tilo in the eye, no matter that Tilo’s promised not to judge him. He lets his stinging eyes trace the arches that soar far above them, where the most brilliant daylight is absorbed completely into a multitude of ancient nooks.

Tilo’s hand has tightened around his, but Marco barely registers it. What he does register is Tilo pulling his chair closer to Marco’s, then taking Marco into his arms, pulling Marco’s head down against his chest, coiling his powerful arm tightly across the back of Marco’s shoulders.

“Oh, Marco,” he whispers.

Something inside Marco gives. He throws his own arms tightly around Tilo and, as he hasn’t done since he was ten years old and standing at the edge of his grandmother’s grave, cries heartbrokenly until he’s out of tears. The whole time, Tilo’s heart beats strong and sure against his right ear, and from his vantage point he watches a lump rise and fall over and over in Tilo’s throat.

When he’s done, he sniffles, hiccuping once. The sounds dissolve into the echoing silence of the library, the way the light disappears into the vaults of its ceiling. All he can hear is his own breathing, still ragged and rheumy, and Tilo’s deep, even breaths and steady heartbeat.

Then he feels a palm on his head, hesitant at first, then stroking his hair with more and more assurance. The fine hairs on the back of his neck rise pleasantly.

“I’m a dead man too, you know,” Tilo whispers.

“I know,” Marco replies huskily. The rest of the hairs on his body stand, sing. Tilo’s shirt smells like laundry soap and sweat and leather. One nipple creates a small indentation in it, a few centimeters away from Marco’s lips.

Then it’s Tilo’s fingers that are those few centimeters away, stroking Marco’s cheek, coming closer. Marco doesn’t think, can’t think, before he moves his head forward and kisses the tip of Tilo’s forefinger. He feels Tilo’s lungs fill with the air he takes in sharply, and he wants to feel that again, hear more than just a gasp out of him. He sucks that rough-ridged fingertip into his mouth, taking it no more deeply than between his lips, caressing the very end of it with his tongue. Tilo doesn’t stop him, but his breathing has shallowed out, and his heart is racing at Marco’s ear.

Marco won’t be sure later how much the raising of his head was his own doing and how much of it was the sudden force of Tilo’s hand under his chin. But within a moment their mouths are moving against one another, softly at first, then harder, more desperately, like the kiss could bring both of them back to actual life instead of a sick charade of it. Marco’s fingers are working through the asymmetrical layers of Tilo’s hair, rubbing the fine strands between their tips, and Tilo’s mouth moves to his throat and makes hot wet patterns that draw an unsteady moan out of him.

Tilo stops and looks up at him and whispers, “Are you okay with … doing this?”

Marco swallows hard. Is he okay with doing this. He could _die_ in a few days, if one of the Corpsmen is lucky enough with their blade or their shot. More likely, and he wants to think about it even less than he does dying for real, he could kill some of the closest friends he’s ever had. And here Tilo is, asking him if Marco’s okay with him kissing him and licking his neck and giving him a boner that he could probably drill through the seat of the library chair with. He knows this line of thought is unfair to Tilo, he knows Tilo’s trying to make sure he’s not taking advantage of Marco, but his frustration leaks out a little when he breathes, “Of course it’s okay. I’m not fighting you off, am I?” and follows the words with a huff of laughter.

“Yeah, well… I’ve got rank on you, and a couple of years too, I think.” Tilo’s stroking his face again. “You’re what, eighteen?”

Marco shakes his head. “Sixteen.”

Tilo closes his eyes with a sigh. “Goddamn. I feel old.”

“Tilo...” Marco breaks off. If he’s old enough to be experimented on and to have a third of his body torn away and to be brought back to life and to be sent off to kill a bunch of old friends who are his own age or even younger, he’s old enough to lie down skin to skin with a senior squadmate and to let the taste of him wash the grief out of his blood for one damn hour. He doesn’t say it, because he doesn’t want to talk about any of it except that last bit, and he imagines Tilo wants to even less. What he ends up saying is, “Let’s just do it, okay?”

Tilo pulls his head down again and kisses him until Marco is ready to just throw him down on the hard tiles of the floor, cool even at summer’s height, and lie naked against him there. But Tilo pulls back and whispers, “Have you ever been up in the loft?”

“There’s a loft?”

Amusement tugs at the corners of Tilo’s mouth. “Where do you think those stairs over there go to, idiot?” Then he’s standing and pulling on Marco’s hand, and Marco’s standing, even though his legs aren’t that steady right now, and they’re climbing the steep staircase of ancient wood that groans a bit under their feet but doesn’t sway or buckle.

The loft is much warmer than the floor of the library, being fully enclosed and so much higher off the ground and having a small square window in its slanted outer wall. There are well-upholstered armchairs, small tables stacked with books, and a few wooden bookcases of modest height.

Along the right-angled inner wall is a long couch with a broad, deep seat. They remove their boots and struggle out of their jackets and gloves, leaving it all in a pile on the thick carpet with its jewel-like colors. Then they tumble onto the velvety surface of the couch seat, a single organism of melded mouths and entangling arms and legs, rolling and turning, thrusting and grinding.

Tilo’s fingers make short work of the buttons on Marco’s shirt. His eyes, more black than gold now, glide over the hard muscles of Marco’s chest, and his right hand follows them. Marco sighs, pushing into the touch, hips arching forward too. “God, you’re beautiful,” Tilo breathes. “Do you have freckles _everywhere?”_

“Almost,” Marco mutters, a little abashed. Jean liked them, but the main reactions of other guys to them have been crass shower-room jokes at Marco’s expense.

Tilo’s mouth is around Marco’s right nipple now, and Marco could cry with how the ever-so-gentle sucking pressure, all lips and tongue with just the most delicate brush of teeth, is turning him into a heated, throbbing ball of putty. Then Tilo looks up with a mischievous grin and whispers, “Then I’m going to have to check every single centimeter of you to see where they are and where they aren’t.”

Marco moans. He lets himself fall back against the couch, arms stretched out over his head, open, vulnerable. He bites his lip when he feels Tilo’s hands at his fly, as deft as they were on his shirt buttons. And then he all but squeaks.

“You like that?” The question is little more than the faintest breath. Marco nods, eyes screwed shut, as Tilo’s calluses slide over his cock, tip to base, base to tip. He arches his hips again into the caress, and when Tilo’s grip tightens he whimpers a little.

Tilo kisses his left nipple and murmurs, “I like to… take it, instead of give it. Are you okay with that? If you want me to top instead, I can.”

“No.” Marco’s barely able to breathe at that revelation. “I- I’m fine with that.”

“Good.” Tilo’s mouth is moving up the column of his neck again. “Because you have one of the most gorgeous cocks I’ve ever seen, Marco, and you have no idea how much I want it inside me.”

“Oh, God, Tilo,” Marco chokes, with Tilo’s mouth pressing his own name back into Marco’s throat.

Several wild minutes of kissing and groping later, something occurs to Marco, and he pulls back a little. “Wait,” he gasps. “We’re gonna need oil.”

“Most people who come up here to fuck steal a little oil out of the lamps,” Tilo says breathlessly. “But I’ve got some 3DMG lube in my jacket pocket. I wasn’t up for taking any chances this morning.”

 _This afternoon’s another story,_ Marco thinks, but he pushes the thought away as Tilo rolls off the couch onto his feet. Up until now he’s always been careful about checking his squadmate out, partly out of discretion, partly not to encourage himself to hope. Now he lets himself admire the tight circles of Tilo’s ass, his trousers still clinging to them, as Tilo crouches to retrieve the oil.

“Catch.” Tilo tosses the little vial in a low, gentle arc, and it lands neatly in Marco’s palm. Then, still on his feet, he begins to unbutton his shirt. The firm pectorals emerge, then the cut-crystal divisions of Tilo’s belly, and Marco pays them the attention they deserve, the attention he feared to give them at the pond. He chews his lip lightly when Tilo undoes his fly, harder when his trousers and underwear fall to the floor and his cock is jutting into the air.

Tilo catches his expression and smiles. He moves back to the couch to lie naked and hot-skinned up against Marco, hooking one leg behind him and pulling Marco’s hips between his own thighs. Marco groans against Tilo’s mouth at the touch of his squadmate’s cock to his, groans louder at how Tilo has him so perfectly imprisoned.

Tilo sucks Marco’s earlobe into his mouth, lets it slide out with a soft pop, and whispers, “Wanna start opening me up?”

“Oh, God, yes.”

Tilo pushes himself backward and away from Marco, then kneels on the couch with his knees wide apart. He folds his arms on top of the back and rests his head on them. Placing the vial to one side, Marco begins to fondle the ass presented to him. He cups his palms around it to take complete measure of its curves, then strokes and presses and squeezes, noting the sensitivity of the skin, the firmness of the flesh beneath. Tilo makes a humming sort of sigh and works his hips a little against Marco’s hands.

Marco uncorks the vial and slickens his right middle finger thoroughly with the already warm oil. Then he traces the fingertip up and down the outer edges of Tilo’s ass cleft, working slowly inward, listening to Tilo’s slightly faster breathing as he does. His fingertip bumps over Tilo’s hole, and Tilo sucks in his breath.

He takes his time, the way he used to take it with Jean in their earliest days together. Insinuating the finger slowly, relishing the hot and suffocatingly tight resistance, then gently withdrawing it again, and adding a drop or two more oil every few strokes. His sense is that Tilo’s been celibate longer than he has. Tilo murmurs encouragement and approval, clenching a little around Marco’s finger as it works him just a little bit open.

The second finger elicits a barely audible grunt. To distract Tilo from the burn, Marco slides his free hand between his squadmate’s spraddled thighs to stroke his ballsack. The response is another hum of pleasure, this one louder than the first, and Marco can feel Tilo loosen a little even before he begins to scissor his fingers.

“All right?” he whispers.

“Mm, more than all right.” A shudder ripples down the column of Tilo’s spine. “You’re sure you’re only sixteen? You’re good at this.”

“Well, I’ve had some practice,” Marco says with a self-deprecating chuckle.

“Evidently.” Tilo follows the word up with a gasp as Marco’s forefinger grazes the bump of his prostate. Marco withdraws completely and eases both fingers in again before he repeats the caress. Tilo has been undulating a bit since they began, but now he starts to fuck himself in earnest on Marco’s fingers.

They’re at the point that if it were Jean and not Tilo, Marco would be calling him a filthy slut, telling him how he was going to fuck him so hard the entire estate would hear him yelling Marco’s name. He realizes with a little wistfulness that even though the dirty talk has never come naturally to him — before the injection, anyway — he kind of misses being able to just open his mouth and say it without thinking about it. He has an inkling that Tilo might get into it, but Marco doesn’t want to spring it on him. Maybe next time. Instead he asks roughly, “Think you’re ready?”

“Ah, yeah,” Tilo breathes. “Give me your cock, Marco. Please.”

He’s missed this, too, the warmth and solidity of a muscular back arching into his chest, his slickened cock nestled just within the cleft of a firm, round ass. He divides Tilo’s buttocks with the fingers of one hand and guides himself home with the other, and then he’s pushing Tilo into the back of the couch, pushing himself into Tilo.

They’re still for a moment, Tilo’s back heaving against Marco’s chest. Marco could almost float away on the intense feeling of being engulfed by another man’s body, the damp and intimate heat, the quivering grip. He puts his hands on Tilo’s shoulders, drags his tongue across the nape of Tilo’s neck, and, as Tilo shivers underneath him, whispers, “Ready?” Tilo just nods, and Marco begins to fuck into him.

He’s gentle at first, letting Tilo adjust to his girth, working all the oil on himself and inside Tilo into a slick patina that covers every millimeter of intimate flesh against intimate flesh. As maddening as it is to pace himself, still it feels too soon when Tilo bucks backward against him and groans, _“Harder.”_ But Marco doesn’t tease or deny him, instead just pumps into him with force that makes their moistening skin slap together.

As he fucks Tilo he drops his right hand from Tilo’s shoulder to run it down his chest and side, flicking the nipple with his fingertips as they skim by. They tangle in the outermost reaches of Tilo’s pubic hair as Marco’s hand slides down his hip and then inward, fitting his palm over the top of Tilo’s thigh. Tilo shifts beneath him, trying to thrust both forward and back at once. Marco grips his cock abruptly, drawing a gasp from him. “Is this what you want?” he grunts.

“Oh, God, _yes,”_ Tilo moans, rocking back against him.

Marco begins to jack him slowly in time with his own thrusts, holding his hand so that it entirely encompasses Tilo’s girth. Tilo, panting, moves back and forth beneath him as smoothly as a piston. As he moves faster, so does Marco’s hand, slicking the foreskin up and down, holding it tight to the flesh underneath.

When he thumbs the slit in the head, Tilo utters a sharp cry. His back bows as he shoves his ass higher, and on Marco’s downstroke he calls out again. Marco grabs his left hip and begins to lunge into him, and the momentum drives Tilo’s cock hard against the inside of Marco’s fist.

“Marco—” The words are sticking in Tilo’s throat, but the spasms that have begun deep inside him, reverberating through Marco’s cock, make them superfluous. Marco pulls him tight against his own body, the fingers of his left hand leaving deep indentations in Tilo’s hip, and his thrusts get short and rough. His abdominal muscles go rigid, and as the tight, insistent heat of orgasm rises up from his balls, he screws his eyes shut and groans.

Tilo shudders convulsively against him and utters a stream of incoherent sounds, and then his come surges hot and sticky over the back of Marco’s hand. Marco lasts only seconds longer. With a cry that echoes through the loft he drives hard into Tilo one final time and then explodes inside him.

As the ringing in his ears dies and his own breathing begins to slow, he hears Tilo say softly, “… ‘Jean’? Was that his name?”

For a split second, Marco is ice cold. Then his whole body is blazing with shame. “Oh. Oh, my God, I’m sorry,” he stammers, pulling clumsily out of Tilo and staggering backward from the couch. “I’m so sorry, Tilo.”

“Marco—”

“Sorry, I’m so sorry,” Marco babbles as he tries to grab his clothing up from the floor with unsteady hands.

Tilo’s turned around now to sit on the couch. “Marco. It’s okay. Really.” Marco continues to mutter apologies with tears in his voice as he attempts to dress. When he finally manages to shove his left foot into the correct boot, Tilo snaps, “Oh, for fuck’s sake. Do I have to give you another order?”

Marco looks up at him for the first time since they came, and he opens his mouth. Before he can speak, Tilo says deadpan, “You say ‘sorry’ one more time, I’m putting you on kitchen duty for a month after we get back from Trost.”

It breaks the spell; Marco starts to chuckle a little. Then he looks down at the carpet and bites his lip.

“In case it makes you feel any better,” Tilo says, “you’re not the only one who was thinking at least part of the time about someone else.”

Marco looks up at Tilo again, startled. Even before the stab of jealousy in his gut is gone, he wants to laugh at himself for how stupid it is. Instead he asks, “So what was his name?”

“Sören,” Tilo says, the barest hint of a smile on his lips. “And he had freckles all over him, too.”

Marco smiles shyly. “Well… you kind of look like Jean, for that matter.”

“I’m not really surprised.” Tilo’s smile widens. “Come here, Marco.”

Marco obeys. Tilo takes him in his arms and pulls him down onto the couch. They lie there for a little while, holding one another without speaking. 

Finally Marco asks softly, “Is he… Sören… still alive?”

A beat goes by, and Tilo whispers, “I don’t know. I hope so.” Marco doesn’t say anything. After another minute, Tilo adds, “I… we… weren’t in battle when it happened. We were visiting his family five years ago. In Shiganshina.” 

Marco tightens his arms around him, and Tilo returns the pressure. A moment passes.

Tilo’s grip on Marco eases a bit. He says, “Sören had gone out to buy a bottle of vine for dinner. Five minutes later, we started to hear the commotion — and then his father’s house came down around us. Me, his parents, his little sisters. I was struck in the right temple by one of the rafters. The end of the rafter, too. Didn’t remember a thing after that for the next week. Then I woke up in the same bedroom in the guest inn you did, with Dr. Gottspieler standing over me.”

“And they wouldn’t tell you what happened to Sören and his family?”

Tilo shakes his head. “No. They told me what Josephine and I have been telling you: It’s better to forget it all.”

Another few beats pass. Then Marco whispers, “But you haven’t. Have you?”

Tilo doesn’t answer at first. Then he exhales roughly and says, “It’s possible not to dwell. It’s not possible to forget entirely. That said, I thought I’d put it all behind me. And I wasn’t celibate, either. There was a young estate worker here for a while, and we used to give each other blowjobs, but he moved on last year. And I’d hook up with someone every time the Interior Squad got together… other than last night. The rest of the time, I just jerked off. And…” Tilo sighs. “It was okay.

“And then you joined Squad Landsmann, and… shit. You look _nothing_ like him, Marco, for the most part. Sören was shorter than you, with red hair and blue eyes and different features. But the freckles. I hadn’t seen anyone with that many freckles in five years. And… I started dreaming about him again, which I hadn’t done after the first six or eight months I was here. And then—” Tilo chuckles. “And then you started appearing in those dreams, and after a few weeks you replaced him entirely. It was a real mindfuck, let me tell you.”

“Well,” Marco says, a little flattered but mostly befuddled. “I’m… sorry, I guess?”

They both start laughing quietly. Tilo presses his forehead against Marco’s and whispers, “Don’t be,” before he kisses him more softly than anyone’s ever kissed Marco before, even Jean.

When the kiss ends, Marco asks, “How old _are_ you, anyway?”

“Twenty-three.”

Marco raises a brow. “That’s not all that old.”

“Yeah, well. Compared with sixteen, it is. And…” Tilo’s eyes take on a haunted look. “This place has a way of making you feel ancient. Especially when you’ve been here for years.”

This time it’s Marco who kisses him with infinite tenderness.

“So, the others,” he says not long after. “They’re augmented, but not like you or me?”

“We’ve all been augmented in the same way, via injection. But they’ve never incurred injuries that would kill a normal human being. If they ever do and they’re able to regenerate the damaged tissue, they’ll be restricted to the estate, just like you and me.”

“Do they…” Marco trails off. “Um… do they have….”

Tilo frowns. “Do they ever get laid, do you mean? That’s a rather impertinent question, Brigadier.” Marco blushes, but before he can stammer an apology, the frown inverts. “And I’m going to answer it: yes, they do. Josephine has a ‘friend’ in Stohess, a guy I think, and Dolphus and Godmar regularly hit up the brothels there or in Mitras.”

Marco blinks. “Oh. For some reason I thought the two of them…”

“It was just this one time,” Tilo says, straightfaced. “From what I heard from Josephine, it required a lot of vine and whiskey beforehand. And a lot afterward, too, so they could try to forget it ever happened.”

Marco bursts out laughing. When he subsides and wipes his eyes, Tilo is watching him again, smiling, and once more Marco brings their lips together.

They stay in the loft a few more hours. They bring each other off again, cock against cock and mouth against mouth, but mostly they talk and laugh and caress each other and embrace.

Finally Tilo looks out the skylight and frowns. “It’s getting a bit late. We should go back. I’m hungry, and we do need to get ready for the ride.”

Marco checks his sense of disappointment that this afternoon has to end. His stomach has also begun to complain, and he doesn’t want Josephine or, worse, Captain Ackerman and Lieutenant Hauer to realize they’ve been gone so long.

They clean up, dress, pad down the creaking staircase, and strap their Gear back on. Marco is about to push the heavy iron door open when he feels Tilo’s hands on his shoulders, spinning him around to draw him into another kiss. A warm and sweet eternity later, Tilo pulls back and whispers, “After Trost, after the victory party, I’m going to take you back here again, Marco, and you’re going to fuck me until I can’t walk for an entire day.”

Marco swallows, ignores the mild rush of blood into his groin — twice in one afternoon is more than he’s had in weeks — and smiles.

****

The ride south to Trost takes, as promised, two days. Two hot, dry, grueling days.

Their horses are, as also promised, an elite breed allowed only to the Central Military Police and the King, one that can cover unnaturally long distances without stopping. But they can’t do entirely without food, rest, and water. So the Interior Squad convoy makes the promised stops at inns along the way for changes of mount, calls of nature, and nights of rest. En route, they gnaw at ration bars and swill from canteens. Conversation is held almost entirely in shouts.

On both mornings they have enough time to wash up a little bit from ewers and bowls, but not enough to bathe thorougly. Marco hasn’t gone a day without a shower since he first awoke on the estate, and before that he’d have to think back to his last trainee survival hike. As he jolts and jostles in the saddle wishing for a long, hot shower and a steaming plateful of bacon and eggs, he realizes — not without wry amusement — that no matter how much the Interior Squad training has shaped him into an elite soldier, it’s left him soft in other ways.

As in the parade grounds formation, he’s next to Dolphus and behind Tilo. He makes sure to appreciate the perfect view of Tilo’s ass whenever Tilo leans over the neck of his horse. He wonders if these displays are intentional and a little more frequent than necessary. It’s a long, punishing ride, but it’s still a convoy, not requiring advanced horsemanship from any of them. Otherwise, Tilo behaves as nothing more than his senior squadmate, and Marco returns the formality. Talk’s inevitable, he supposes, but there’s no need to fuel it, especially when all their energies should be focused on the upcoming battle.

They’ve been on the road nearly all the morning of the third day when a rider at the front calls out. A few moments later, the turrets and spires of Trost appear on the horizon. Marco goes light-headed with dread, then buries his teeth in his lower lip until the pain chases the fear away. He didn’t die here, he reminds himself. He’s stronger than he ever was. He’s not going to shame his squadmates by surrending to the ghosts that await him in this city.

A dozen CMP ostlers meet them at the inner gate of Rose to collect the well-lathered horses. Then, as they’ve been instructed, the Interior Squad slips subsquad by subsquad into the city. Each subsquad takes a different backstreet route to the rendezvous point, all carrying their jackets and their armaments in rucksacks. The battle is not predicted to break out for several hours yet, and Captain Ackerman wants them to draw as little attention as possible beforehand.

Squad Landsmann’s route takes them past neither Jean’s parents’ house nor … that street. But Marco, walking between Josephine and Tilo, keeps his eyes straight ahead and tries to ignore anything that is not immediately in front of him. If he were to spot the sign of the teashop where Jean bought them scones, or that of the tavern where they kissed sloppily in a booth at the back amid a crowd of indifferent drunks, he’d have to squander precious energy fighting down the memories.

The rendezvous point is a small, unassuming two-story building without signs, a few side streets away from a broad commercial thoroughfare. The sixty of them enter three abreast through the rear door, followed by Captain Ackerman and Lieutenant Hauer. As soon as the door is pulled shut, the Interior Squad falls silent, not even saluting, which would create unnecessary noise.

“Men,” Captain Ackerman says, containing his volume to just that which will allow everyone gathered to hear him. “While I can’t get into all the details of the intelligence I’ve received, I _can_ tell you that we expect the Survey Corps to emerge from hiding at about sixteen hundred hours. The lure is a funerary wagon carrying two coffins, driven by allies of ours. We’ve had false word passed around that the wagon is secretly transporting weapons, gold, and sensitive correspondence up to Mitras.

“In the interim, you will take up your positions along their predicted route, mostly on the rooftops. Lieutenant Hauer and I have worked out those positions based on the optimal way to keep tabs on, then close in on, our targets. You all know the basics by now, don’t you?” He raises an eyebrow.

A little out of unison, all the Brigadiers except Marco mutter, “Two diagonals, high perch, clear view.”

“That’s right,” Lieutenant Hauer declares. “You’re to spread out so that at any given time, at least two of you can have diagonal lines of sight on each of our targets from their rear. And you’ll perch as highly as the architecture allows so that you’ll have a clear view of them. Turrets, steeples, chimneys, the tops of façades. We don’t know just how many targets there’ll be, but we’re anticipating fewer than twenty, which gives us plenty of numerical advantage.”

“However,” Captain Ackerman continues, raising his voice slightly. “Almost certainly, we will be dealing with Levi.” A few involuntary hisses of anger rise from the Interior Squad. The captain rides over them with an emphatic, _“Do not underestimate him._ I have enough familiarity with the little bastard that I can tell you in all honestly: he is not just remarkably strong. His instincts are very good, he’s cagey as all hell, and he’s been exceedingly well trained. As much as he deserves your contempt, don’t let it throw you off-guard. It could cost you your life, and your squadmates their lives.”

The Brigadiers have already fallen, and remain, silent. Captain Ackerman’s face is set in a scowl deep even for him, and Lieutenant Hauer’s is like stone. Finally he reaches into his jacket and pulls out a sheaf of papers. “These are the orders for your positions, one sheet for each subsquad. Your squad leader will direct you there. Each of you will hold your position until you have a direct line of sight on one of our targets. Then you will go after them. With luck, the first few squads will take care of our little sanitation problem, and the rest will be a simple mop-up. Do the Brigade proud, men.”

“Sir,” the Interior Squad murmurs as one, and then the subsquad leaders gather around the lieutenant for their orders.

****

The subsquads are strung along the roofs of the buildings that line the broad avenue nearby. They make themselves as inconspicuous as possible, keeping to the roof pitches that face away from the avenue. Their jackets and Gear are on. They’ve had another nominal meal of ration bars washed down with water, and now they sip sparingly from their canteens. Nobody wants to have to take a piss from the rooftop, especially the women, just in case the battle starts earlier than planned.

This part of Trost is, blessedly, unfamiliar to Marco. It’s not one in which to stroll or people-watch while savoring a cup of tea; it’s one for workaday business. Squad Landsmann are on the roof of the grain exchange. Rather than swap endless silent looks with his squadmates, eyes blinking rapidly above grimly set mouths, Marco tries to relieve the tension and boredom by taking note of the buildings. To the right, a small marketplace with an arched colonnade. To the left, the local Wallist church, with its high spire and its bell tower. All about, offices for lawyers, physicians, and insurance agents. A saloon. A funeral parlor. A printing press. The headquarters of Reeves Corporation, which supplies all three legions of the military, and whose owner the Survey Corps butchered and left lying in the street.

The sun is low in the stretch of western sky visible above Wall Rose when they hear the first shot. “It’s on!” Dolphus hisses as they all go ramrod-straight, hands tightening on the triggers of their 3DMG.

They hear another shot, and then a third. There are the muffled thuds of bodies hitting cobblestone from a great height, and then a woman’s scream. A few more shots ring out, followed by an odd metallic clang. Someone on another rooftop cries out, “There he is!”, and Marco spies a small figure zipping between roofs high over the street on a 3DMG wire.

As the funerary wagon truckles into view, Squad Jarosz leap from their roof into the air, meeting their quarry. Marco gets a closer look at him. Quite short for a man, but rippling with muscle under his sweat-soaked shirt. Dark hair, pale skin, pointy features. Narrow eyes burning with utter hatred.

 _Hundred and sixty centimeters of violent psycho._ Marco’s heart stops, then starts again.

Squad Jarosz opens fire. Levi drops to the ground, then backs away rapidly down the avenue. Marco loses sight of him amid Squad Jarosz, the blaze of guns, and exploding masonry. Then he reappears, only to haul himself over the swinging doors of the saloon — on whose roof Enrique Duran of Squad Voorhees waits — and disappear within.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Tilo rasps. “They missed him completely!”

_Do not underestimate him._

As if cued by Marco’s remembrance of his warning, Captain Ackerman appears in the street and strides angrily into the establishment. Marco can hear shouting inside, but not the words. A crowd of rubberneckers has begun to gather on the opposite side of the street.

Not five minutes later, they hear another shot from inside the saloon. If Marco’s ears are correct, it’s not from an anti-personnel gun but from a rifle. Captain Ackerman staggers backward out of the swinging doors, then collapses with his legs on the steps and his upper body on the ground, his hat coming to settle over his face.

Infuriated cries rise from the rooftop across from the salon. Marco’s pretty sure it’s Lietenant Hauer yelling, _“Captain Ackerman?! Did he get hit?!”_ Then he sees her drop to the ground, but his attention is immediately commandeered by the sound of shattering glass and a brief glimpse of something flying out one of the saloon’s side windows.

“The shit is _this_ shit?” Godmar growls behind Marco, just as they hear Duran yelp, “Wha?! A _chair?!”_ and see Levi exit through the same window.

The Survey Corps captain turns, his face a mask of rage, and shoots a grapple upward. It buries itself in Duran’s throat, blood blossoming up around it.

As Levi arcs up toward the dead Brigadier, Marco hears a howl go up from the much higher roof of the house next to the saloon: _“Duran got killed!?”_ It’s another member of Squad Voorhees, one whose name Marco’s never learned. Next to him, Squad Leader Willem Voorhees shouts, “He’s coming! Don’t shoot yet! Wait ‘til he’s in range!”

But Levi remains on the saloon roof below. Duran’s comrades lose their patience, shoot out a wire in his direction, and cross the alley. A figure pops up from further down toward the eaves, and Squad Voorhees’s shots ring out.

“Did they get him?!” Dolphus barks.

“No. What the—” Josephine’s words grind to a halt, her mouth still open.

“That son of a bitch used Duran’s body as a _shield!”_ Godmar cries, and just then they see Levi swinging through the air behind the two Brigadiers. A bright arc of metal gleams in the sinking sun. A bloody gash opens up in Voorhees’s nape. Marco’s mouth is open and dry, his stomach clenched like a fist.

Tilo’s voice shakes with anger as the squad leader falls. “Like a titan. That’s what the fucking Survey Corps does to _titans!”_

 _“He’s getting away!”_ someone on another squad, the name of which Marco can’t recall, hollers as Levi disappears. That squad leaps from their rooftop and disappears as well, but the thunder of gunfire can be heard from the inner Rose gate. No sooner have they all reappeared high above the street when there’s a sickening _thunk_ and an agonized scream. Levi pulls his grapple out of the man’s belly, then drives his blade through the gaping wound. Bisected, the Brigadier’s body plunges amid the enraged shouts of his squadmates, and Levi vanishes yet again before they can avenge the fallen man.

“I’m gonna kill that little fuck myself!” Dolphus yells. 

“Not if I get to him first,” Tilo snarls.

Bile scorches Marco’s throat. Squad Landsmann’s turn, he knows, is next. His body is so rigid now it’s shaking, and that’ll make for shitty fighting form, but he can’t unbend or relax one millimeter. Terror and anger bloom inside him, one after the other, freezing and searing him over and over. He honestly can’t say which he wants to do more: blow Levi’s head clear off his body, or duck into the colonnade next door and hide until this is all over.

And then he hears the jingle of tack, the clop of hooves, and the rattle of a new wagon. “Men! Let’s _go!_ ” Josephine barks, and as they launch themselves from the roof of the grain exchange, far below Marco hears a high-pitched cry: “They’re _turning!”_

The Survey Corps party is about half a dozen people, with as many horses in addition to the wagon. Two figures from it rise into the air to meet Squad Landsmann, one from the back of the wagon — Levi — and one from the back of a horse. Marco’s heart shudders to another stop when he recognizes the second.

It’s not a surprise at all, though he didn’t anticipate how it would make his heart feel like it was tearing in his chest. He hangs back, fearful Mikasa will recognize him. He realizes he fears the shock of seeing him might cause her to hesitate, and he feels more ashamed than if he’d hung back out of pure cowardice.

It’s Tilo who gets to Levi first, as he threatened he would. Eyes narrowing, he raises his left arm and pulls the trigger of his gun. Levi’s own left arm comes down in a blinding, gleaming blur. And then that same metallic clang—

 _ **“No!”**_ Marco screams.

Tilo’s throat has split in half and is fountaining blood. His head flops uselessly over onto his upper back.

“Marco!” Josephine bellows. “The wagon! _Get the ones in the wagon!”_

He obeys without thought, grateful, so grateful for the order. Numbness is creeping rapidly up his scalp and down his spine. His stomach churns with things he can’t name.

He can’t kill Levi. But he can kill the rest of them.

He plunges toward the wagon. _The driver,_ he thinks. If the driver dies or even just loses control of the reins, the wagon could turn over, killing the taller man in the bowler hat who stands in the back. It could take down some of the Survey Corps horses as well, or cause the horses to panic and throw their riders.

The driver’s head is bent. Yellow licks of hair stick out from under the edge of his — possibly her — hood. Fair-skinned hands grip the reins, their knuckles stark white.

And then the head comes up. Huge blue eyes grow even huger when they recognize who’s hovering just above, and a small mouth shapes Marco’s name.

_Armin._

Before Marco can call his name in return, something hard and blunt drives square into the back of his skull. He plummets face first to the floor of the wagon, blood squirting from his nose on impact with the pine boards. His ears are ringing so loudly from the blow that at first he doesn’t register the racking of the rifle.

“Don’t move!!” screams—

_—no. Can’t be. I’m not hearing right._

Armin’s high voice manages to snap with authority and quaver with shock at the same time. “Jean, _hold your fire!”_

Slowly, Marco manages to lift and turn his pounding head.

The straw bowler completely hides Jean’s hair from view. Beneath its brim, his eyes are possibly huger than Armin’s right now. The rifle shakes in his hands.

“Marco?” he whispers.

“Yeah,” Marco says. “It’s me, Jean.”

“…Marco?!” comes an incredulous voice from a few meters above.

“Hi, Mikasa,” Marco says, like it’s completely normal to greet your old training mate that casually after she’s just kicked you down so that your former lover can put a bullet in your brain. 

From beyond the wagon he hears two voices call his name just as incredulously. _Connie. Sasha._ Only Armin is silent now.

Marco looks at Jean again and gets shakily to his feet. Then he says the first thing that comes to mind, which is the most obvious and the most stupid thing that anyone has ever said, anywhere: “You’re in the Survey Corps.”

Jean is blank with shock for a moment. Then his face begins to pinken, his eyes to narrow, his lips to draw back. “No shit, Marco,” he spits.

Marco’s gut constricts. He hasn’t realized how much he’s missed seeing Jean angry. Realizing how stupid the question is at this precise moment, he asks, “Why aren’t you in the MPs?”

“Because I thought you _died,_ you asshole!” Jean shouts. “And because I figured out that if the titans could get into Trost, there’d eventually be no safety for my slack ass in the interior, either!”

He falls silent, panting, eyes wide, as Marco stares at him and Mikasa and Armin and Connie and Sasha stare at Marco. Then Jean blinks, and Marco sees wetness well up in his eyes and one fat drop slide down the side of his face.

Marco, his throat tight and dry, reaches out, angling his right arm so that his gun points sideways instead of at Jean. He flattens his palm, splays his fingers. Jean, choking back a sob, thrusts his rifle under his left arm and reaches out with his right. His words are tear-choked. “You’re alive. You’re fucking _alive_. How the hell—”

“Marco, what the fuck are you _doing?!”_ bawls a voice from above.

Marco looks up to see a long, lank form descending, dark ponytail caught in the wind, right arm pointing straight down at Jean.

_Oh, no._

It all happens at once, but for Marco every movement unfolds at the pace of a fly sinking into an open jar of honey.

Mikasa swoops down the last few meters, right arm drawn back.

Armin turns again, his face a snarling rictus that makes him, for once, look older than his age. Something small and shiny is in his outstretched right hand.

Marco screams _“No!”_ a second time as he leaps into the spot where Josephine is about to land facing Jean.

Mikasa’s blade flashes blindingly in the sun. Marco thinks of Tilo’s bullet, Levi’s blade, and Tilo’s throat. This time it’s Armin’s bullet, Mikasa’s blade, and Josephine’s throat. 

And then the edge of the blade — the sharpest edge known to humanity, forged to cut down titans — slicing deep into Marco’s own throat, deep into his spine, as deep as Captain Ackerman promised he’d drive his own knife.

He remembers hearing somewhere, maybe in training or maybe from Armin, that you can live for a very short while after losing your head, seeing and hearing and feeling. Kind of like the chickens his grandmother kept. It’s a dumb thing to think about when you’re dying. But this is his second time dying, so he already knows it’s not all romantic the way it is in songs and stories.

He hears three voices scream his name as his head tumbles out of the wagon. Josephine’s isn’t one of them. She no longer has a throat to scream out of, just a ragged gape beneath her chin that pumps out liters of blood. It mixes into the blood that fountains from Marco’s severed neck. All of it inundates their bodies, splashes hard onto Mikasa, drenches Jean. Her head falls forward on the intact vertebrae of her neck before her body tumbles over the edge of the wagon.

Marco’s cheek hits the cobblestones hard. The right cheek, the one that regenerated itself. _That’ll leave a bruise,_ he thinks, before he remembers. He can still hear screaming, and someone crying, too, and then a man’s deep voice calling out orders over the wracking sobs just before the wagon has pulled too far ahead for him to hear more.

He feels selfish in his sense of relief. Josephine will be out of commission for a long while, and then she’ll be living the same shadow of a life that Tilo and Marco lived. Mikasa now carries the weight of Marco’s death on her shoulders. Sasha and Connie, Armin and, oh, God, _Jean,_ all carry the burden of watching him fall.

But Marco is free. And Tilo is, too.

He’s heard that when you die, wherever it is you go, you go with the weight of the wrongs you’ve committed in life on your shoulders. Maybe all that horror and grief and guilt will sit on his shoulders forever. But at least he won’t forever be staggering under the weights of their deaths.

He hopes he sees Tilo there, wherever it is.

He hopes he sees his grandmother there, too.

The thoughts leave one last soft smile on the regenerated face with no body beneath it. Then Trost fades away, once more, for good.


End file.
